According to a Moody's study, the U.S. jobs forecast remains gloomy until 2010-2012, when a rebound is predicted. Senior Designer Juan Thomassie visualized the data, which can be sorted nationally and state-by-state in 14 different job sectors.

See the interactive charts.

According to the story by Barbara Hagenbaugh and Barbara Hansen, "Employers across the country are expected to begin adding jobs in 2010, but it won't be until late 2011 that the number of jobs is equal to the levels that existed when the recession began at the end of 2007"

Over the past week, we've been rolling out our Inauguration Day multimedia coverage, promoted from numerous locations throughout the site, and YouTube and Flickr. The icon here needs some explaining. America's Journey: Inauguration Day 2009 is a feature video documentary currently being produced by the staff of USA TODAY. Check it out on Amazon. 

For your convenience, a multimedia index:

Video perspectives: Interviews with Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, Dr. Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women, and others share their thoughts on this historic event.

Student voices: Students working exclusively for USA TODAY share their perspectives on the events and activities surrounding the inauguration.

Photo galleries: Nine collections mark the day, from record crowds gathering on the National Mall to the swearing-in ceremony to the evenings gala events.

Parade route map: Multiple layers of information, from building details to latest video and photos, are available in one location.

Parade time lapse: Historic events unfold in this series of photographs taken from the top of the Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., over a 14-hour period.

360° Capitol panorama: The west front of the U.S. Capitol building, showing the stands erected for the inauguration.

360°panorama near the Washington Monument: Supporters gather around the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial.

360°panorama near the Lincoln Memorial: Thousands stand north of the Lincoln Memorial.

360°panorama near the World War II Memorial: Supporters stand near the World War II Memorial.

Inaugural address: Watch the address in President Obama's own words or read the prepared text.

Personal reflections on a historic moment: A collection of essays from filmmaker Ken Burns and Archbishop Desmond Tutu to Essence Magazine Editor in Chief Emeritus Susan Taylor and Latina Magazine Editor in Chief Mimi Valdez Ryan.

Obama's cabinet: Meet the individuals who will comprise the new President's cabinet.

Past presidential inaugural speeches: From Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1933 speech to George W. Bush's second inaugural address, see classic images and listen to key moments in their own words and voices.

Community Center citizen journalists: Follow six members of USA TODAY's community as they share their Inauguration Day experiences.

USA TODAY has partnered with The Princeton Review to make available their list of top 100 best value colleges. According to the methodology, "The Princeton Review selected the schools based on surveys of administrators and students at more than 650 public and private college and university campuses."

"Overall selection criteria included more than 30 factors in three areas: academics, costs and financial aid. Academic ratings were based on student surveys about such issues as professors' accessibility and class sizes, as well as institutional reports about student-faculty ratios and percent of classes taught by teaching assistants."

From a design perspective, we kicked around a number of design solutions for the interface. At one point the presentation was dominated by a map. In the final version, that map was greatly reduced and packaged with an alphabetical list of schools. I like the minimalist approach to the navigation. Either the map or the list can be used to locate schools, and interacting with one influences the other. Plus, the real estate dedicated to the navigation does not overwhelm, allowing users to focus on the content.

I also am pleased that we were able to make use of Sam Ward's illustration. Originally requested to visualize the story in the newspaper, it also serves well packaged with the introduction online.

Your comments on the design are welcome.

If you happened to see USA TODAY's story about rating nursing homes (an analysis of for-profit vs. non-profit  homes), you may have noticed the use of a modal window to display the database.

While you may not know the modal window by name, you have interacted with them many times. In the most common scenario, the user clicks a hypertext link, and a separate window expands and overlays the page, revealing detailed information. The screen captures displayed here capture the modal in our nursing homes story page. It contains a searchable database of more than 16,000 homes.

The big benefit of a modal window is the ability to overlay detailed information in context to the larger story without loading a separate page. Moreover, they are easy to deploy. After the success of the nursing homes example, we're talking about ways to make better use of the modal. I am in favor of adding them to our collection of storytelling tools.

Not all favor the modal, but the criticisms are minor from my viewpoint. I found Wikipedia's entry most helpful for a basic explanation.

Early in its planning, the College Bowls calendar looked like any other calendar: A Flash-based interface with bulleted lists of bowl games. Clicking on any item in the list would reveal a logo, game information, analysis, and a poll. The developer assigned to the project, Kristen Novak, picked up on the visual disconnect between the routine calendar interface and all the bowl logos and other information hidden behind it.

What Kristen sensed is a recurring theme. I have often found it a challenge to find a balance between using a recognizable interface to navigate content and establishing a visual cue that informs the user as to what he or she can expect as they interact with interface to revel layers of content.

In this case, we brainstormed and decided to replace the bullet lists on the calendar with miniature bowl logos. The logos establish the visual cue, serving as links to the content. Displayed here is one transition, which illustrates a visual continuity from start to finish. Each frame shows one step in the larger transition. Once the page is loaded, the user immediately is confronted with visual content by way of the bowl logos and two clicks away from text and interactive content.

The five frames here account for the initial load, the first mouseover and click on a day, and the second mouseover and click on a logo.

The newsroom has been buzzing over the last week about Toxic air and America's schools, our special report that tracks industrial pollution and its chemical effect on close to 130,000 schools nationwide. There is much talk about the quality of the reporting (a team spent eight months digging in to this subject) and the fulfillment of the promise of great journalism.

Also discussed is the utilization of the online medium to tell this story. Our searchable database has data for all of the schools listed, and information about how you can take action in your community on a school-by-school basis. By scaling the news from national to local and putting the data and tools in the hands of the public, USA TODAY fulfills a core strength of this medium — to access information and build community. In this case, for the sake of the future of America's children.

Toxic air and America's schools is a model for this type of reporting. Now, it is up to you to get involved, and USA TODAY's responsibility to monitor the flow of information and further report the story as it develops.

During the 2004 election coverage, one of our senior designers, Juan Thomassie, was charged with updating a U.S county-by-county map through the night. Every few minutes, gray counties would change to red or blue depending on the latest data. It occurred to him afterwards that it would be interesting to preserve the data at various points during the night.

Flash forward to 2008: Juan worked with designer Bill Couch to create just such a map, complete with time lapse snapshots of election night as it unfolded. It makes for a unique view.

This map is part of our complete coverage.

Other election maps that caught my attention overnight include the New York Times, which featured a "county bubbles" option that conveys population density and votes, and CNN, which featured as part of their default map shaded states that flipped from Republican to Democratic since the last election.

You now have a way to keep up on all of the latest website multimedia and design innovations published by this blog and other columnists on USATODAY.com. By creating your own customized news alerts, you can receive instant messages through AIM about any keyword when news is published. For example, if your keywords are ‘graphic’, ‘interactive’, ‘feature’, etc., then when stories are published on USATODAY.com containing keywords that you select, AIM will send you an instant message through your USA TODAY buddy with a headline, article summary and link back to the complete story.

If you have AIM, send an IM to “USATODAY” to get started. Then just click on the link in the IM window and set up your custom IM alerts in the keyword tab like in the screen below.

If you don’t have AIM, then download it here, www.aim.com, so that you can have USATODAY.com keep you posted on the latest news.

In a matter of hours, USA TODAY distributed 19,000 beta codes for Sony's LittleBigPlanet. Designer Jerry Mosemak played a key role in making it happen. Jerry explained that LittleBigPlanet had been on games writer Mike Snider's radar for more than a year, and that "TV/Tech editor Bruce Schwartz was interested in a good story describing the revolutionary nature of this game (its cute appeal and its cutting edge game creation tools and social networking features)." A team from Sony came to our home office in McLean, Va., and showed off a final version. All were impressed.

Sony ultimately offered USA TODAY 15,000 beta codes to distribute. They went so fast — in a matter of hours — that Sony made another 4,000 available. They were also gone in a Flash!

Jerry helped design visual elements to go with the story, and worked with others to make the codes accessible.