Hong Kong’s opposition camp was once a vocal and potent force — but that changed dramatically after Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law on the city in 2020.

Some prominent figures were jailed for participating in the Hong Kong 2019 anti-government protests, and some fled overseas. Others announced they had quit politics for good.

In this 2021 infographic, we created a unique visual record of dozens of key activists caught in the fallout.

It was a continuation of earlier South China Morning Post infographics projects about protests in the city that were sparked by a now-withdrawn extradition bill in June 2019. Opposition to the bill morphed into wider and often violent civil unrest, eventually leading to more than 10,000 arrests.

For this project, key figures from the opposition camp were hand-drawn. That’s a lot of faces to draw, taking many painstaking hours. But it was done for a good reason.

The photos we had access to came from different sources and in varying resolutions, colours, and quality. We believed a graphic with numerous headshots wouldn’t do this project justice.

Instead, we believed that doing illustrated portraits would give our project a stronger visual consistency, style, and unique identity. We saw it as an opportunity to convey a Hong Kong story of significant global interest in an informative and original way.

Developing a plan

We decided on creating a “spotlight” pointer that could be navigated by the reader to focus on the people featured in the graphic, one at a time. The pointer would reveal essential details such as their name, role, or affiliation, and if they were charged, convicted, jailed, or acquitted.

In addition, the use of the spotlight on a darker palette gave this infographic a sense of being in a confined space — as if the reader was peering into some sort of detention facility. Readers could, if they wanted to, study details of the graphic for hours using the spotlight feature, examining each individual closely.

But first, we needed to identify who was going to be in this graphic. This involved examining publicly available records and other information about “who, what, where,” so to speak.

That research, over several weeks, identified 180 people initially, many of them district councilors. For this, the graphics team worked closely with colleagues from the Hong Kong news desk, who were on the reporting frontlines during the protests.

Then came the drawing with pen and pencil. This was done first on a very long (200 centimetre) piece of paper. Then we scanned the hand-drawn images so we could move our editing to tablet and desktop, which made finer facial details and shading easier with Photoshop.

Working on the illustrations took us almost two weeks. One of the trickiest parts was arranging the figures for different versions such as mobile, tablet, and desktop.

A portion of the infographic was also dedicated to visually showing other key data related to Hong Kong laws.

The positioning of people in the newspaper edition also took some time and we were pleased with the end result. The sketched figures matched the aesthetics of the Post’s print edition. The project team members who worked on this, in addition to myself, were Jeffie Lam, Dennis Wong, Ka Kuen Lau, and Nadia Lam.

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