I want to facilitate meaningful change through good design.

As Design Director for Gimlet Media, I spearheaded a rebranding initiative that included establishing definitive brand positioning, complimented with entirely new visuals. After successfully pitching the idea to leadership and making it work within budgets, I conducted an agency search, ultimately deciding to work with GrandArmy. From there I provided brand direction along the way and facilitated conversations to include Alex, Matt, and other key Gimlet leadership in the process to arrive at the final product.

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As Design Director for Gimlet Media, I developed a considered process & art direction strategy for designing Podcast Cover Art. This process provided an agency-level service in the creation of podcast artwork for Gimlet showrunners and branded podcast partners, such as Squarespace, Lyft, Reebok, and Adobe. The art direction strategy was built as a playbook to optimize for new user interest in order to increase download numbers — while also making showrunners and brands happy. It also gave our distribution partners, such as Apple and Spotify, an opportunity to also provide feedback before show launches. Leading both an in-house design team and several commissioned guest artists, this process was used to create over 25 new covers for a variety of Gimlet shows.

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I served as the Lead Product Designer for Refinery29's first iOS app, ThisAM. This process involved designing and developing early stage prototypes to identify the right opportunity. It was also used to scope out design and engineering work to arrive at the final product. I worked with the Editorial team to define the optimal length of content per screen of the app, the graphic design team to design the final visual branding of the app, and the engineering team to work within the limits of capabilities while in final development of the app.

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In 2016, during Ilhan Omar's run for a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives, Refinery29 sent a crew to Minneapolis to document her incredible story. I served as the Lead Product Designer tasked with creating a more consumable mobile-web-based experience with the footage they collected along with recorded narration by America Ferrera. I developed a fully functional immersive card-based video/image experience for Ilhan Omar's story that didn't require a native app to view — even before Google AMP Stories became a thing.

• Demo Available Upon Request

For the 2nd installment of Refinery29's 29Rooms in September 2016 at a converted warehouse in Bushwick, I lead the design and development of the marketing website to promote the event. Utilizing commissioned guest artwork from oddfellows, we developed a unique web experience to tease what might be in each room leading up to the opening. After the conclusion of the event the design of the website was updated to feature shared social posts along with a 3D virtual tour of the space.

• Demo Available Upon Request

From 2013-2015 I lead the visual design of Say Media's proprietary publishing platform, Tempest. Before launch, I helped to develop the themeing logic behind Tempest in order to vary the design for different publishers just through a limited set of variables across fonts, colors, and images. I also helped to develop the visual design language of the publisher-facing CMS which enabled editors to program content on specific pages. I assited in the onboarding of the first 25 publishers onto Tempest, including brands like Fashionista, Pacific Standard, Biography.com, xoVain, xoJane, and Rachael Ray.