2026 Illinois Midterm Elections Voter Guide
Lead designer and developer
Designer and developer · Chicago
Andjela Padejski
I’m a designer and developer at Chicago Public Media, building tools that help Chicagoans stay informed, engage in civic life, and hold power to account. Alongside my newsroom work for WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times, I help shape chicago.com.
I lead projects from research and early prototypes through design, development and launch. Trained as an artist, I bring a social design practice to journalism, building tools rooted in community needs and guided by a commitment to open and accessible technology.
Recent work
2026-
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chicago.com Guides
Product designer
Designed the end-to-end flow for creating guides on chicago.com.
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Chicago School Board Voter Guide
Lead designer and developer
Led design and development of a guide to Chicago’s first fully elected school board, shaped by community input and user-tested pre-launch. Available in English and Spanish, with Chinese for selected districts.
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Operation Midway Blitz, by the numbers
Lead designer and developer
A scrolling data feature examining the scale and impact of the federal immigration surge in the Chicago area. Detention and deportation figures trace the 68-day operation and show how the people targeted differed from the administration’s stated priorities. Published in English and Spanish.
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Gary without power
Lead designer and developer
A visual feature on the Aug. 11 derecho and the prolonged outages in Gary, where residents waited nearly two weeks for power to return.
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100 Days of Concerts
Lead designer and developer
Readers browse by genre and date and save shows to a personal list.
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Farmers Market Guides
Lead designer and developer
The city and suburban editions bring scattered market information into one place, organized by location and day, with dates, hours and programming.
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Illinois Primary Voter Guide & Build Your Ballot
Lead designer and developer
Led design and development of a voter guide, personalized ballot builder and live election results. The ballot builder connects newsroom reporting to the races on a reader’s ballot, with candidate profiles and a tool to save or print their selections for the polls.