Currently
Design & Content @ Third Act
Teaching @ Parsons & NYU
Long Ago
Economics & Policy @ LSE
Data Crunching & Munching
Recognition
AIGA Design Award, 2022
Brian-Abel Smith Prize
Beliefs
~ time flies when you're scrolling ~
~ better to be reading or listening or loving or making or living ~
Elsewhere
Design, Strategy, Content
At Third Act, my design and content work spans digital and print graphics, web updates, user testing, accessibility improvements, and style direction for our 70,000+ volunteers. Along with our Creative Director, I provide technical guidance and create resources that help volunteer teams produce consistent, effective communications.
Designing for a senior audience is both the biggest challenge and the most rewarding part of this work. Accessibility drives every choice, from font size and contrast to clarity over ornamentation. I also help shape the organization’s visual voice, balancing a grassroots aesthetic with a level of polish that builds trust and professionalism with prospective members.
Beyond design, I write and edit website content, manage all photo and video assets, and oversee content quality across 34 microsites. Our sites receive thousands of visits daily.
3D Design (Rendering, Simulation, Cinema4D, Maya), After Effects
Ries wanted to showcase the functionality of its containers, especially how each component fits together. Ries is also a beauty brand sold at Sephora, not a utilitarian brand. Its feel is luxurious and Ries cofounder, Megan Graham, wanted a way to maintain this prestige while showing the inner workings.
We decided on 3D animations fairly early in the process. Key were exploding the bottle out and back in, locking, closing, and opening. Then we considered beauty shots and a little extra something.
Ultimately, we chose simplistic, natural backgrounds to highlight the elegance of the product and short 3-second looping animations for easy placement in different modules on the site.
UX/UI Design, Some Code (CSS), Data Viz
Rest of World asked me to design and develop their Impact Report, so that it could be templatized going forward.
Using their brand guidelines and assets, I designed and implemented a report format with custom CSS. I collaborated with their photo editor to select photographs, their fundraising director to work with copy, and their designer for support.
With copious amounts of content and long-scroll request, the key was to find a way to display impact information in a visually-engaging way while adhering to platform constraints.
This interactive report is now used as a template to send to potential and existing donors.
Design, Code (HTML, CSS, React)
Six Emoji Story is a brief history of the emoji told through six emojis, applying the visual simplicity of early emoji to examine the evolution of the pictographic language.
There are a multitude of things to talk about with the emoji, but I had one objective with this story: to make a fun, interactive, and informative story using the pixel aesthetic of early emojis.
I chose six emojis that best represent pivotal points in emoji history based on my research. I used the six colors Kurita used for his original 176 emojis — a coincidental tie-in to the number six.
The sections feature smooth scrolling and an interactive grid. Each section also has annotations and pictures relating to its specific story.
Delicious
Design
The name Delicious comes from one of my Are.na channels, where I collect phrases I like—mostly from books. Reading is nourishment for me; it’s what I reach for when I’m hungriest.
These designs grew out of a desire to create a digital bookshelf layered with notes and quotes. I’ve been developing an organizational system that pulls them from a structured Google Sheet using the SheetsDB API. The interface is tested but not yet built; what you see here are preliminary designs inspired by existing bookshelves and the vivid style of early pulp fiction covers.