China's Shadow Empire: Reshaping Global Power
A five-part investigative series done in collaboration with Politiken and the Pulitzer Center, this project necessitated visuals that could speak to the serious tone of each individual story and remain visually cohesive with the multiple maps and data visuals throughout the series.
Deep Dive: ChatGTP
Deep Dive: Buy Now, Pay Later
Axios Vibes
Deep Dive: Higher Ed
Series for Axios Login: AI
Deep Dive: The Gig Economy
For this Deep Dive, I developed a series of digitally hand-drawn illustrations based off of classic 1940s-1960s advertising. The goal was to contrast a "golden age" of a thriving American middle class--as articulated through campy advertisements--with the less stable and more stressful realities of gig economy work.
Deep Dive: Davos 2020
The Davos Deep Dive was written on the ground by journalists attending Davos, and so the turn-around time was particularly tight. I therefore wanted to create a visual system that was adaptable to last-minute changes in reporting. Thematically, I pulled from illustrations I had recently seen at a 2001: A Space Odyssey exhibit, along with architectural drawings, the concept being that Davos was a meeting of the "architects" of the world's economies. Bringing in visuals of the Swiss landscape--a Davos sign and the Swiss Alps--also helped connect the images back to the setting.
Link to full Deep Dive
Link to full Deep Dive
Deep Dive: Space
The visuals for this Deep Dive included the repetition of shapes and angles along with a consistent color pallet and similar photo treatments. This visual language resulted in a bold, modern look that helped tell the story of modern space exploration.
Deep Dive: Healthcare
Because this Deep Dive was focused on the current realities and political debates around healthcare, I felt that an approach that included images connected to the real world--current politicians, photographs of actual struggling Americans--was important. The visuals for this Deep Dive were therefore very much centered around photography, with a simple system of colors and shapes utilized to augment the photos.
Deep Dive: Drug Pricing
For this Deep Dive, I developed a visual language utilizing elements of medicine; pill bottles, caps, prescriptions, and the drugs themselves. My goal was to hone in on these shapes in a simplified but exaggerated form, to create a dynamic and playful visuals series around the otherwise highly serious subject of drug pricing. With this contrast of playful images with serious content, my goal was to articulate the absurdity of a broken system.
Deep Dive: Refugees
I felt this series on the growing refugee crises called for a style that was human-centered, to shift the reader's focus from broad stories of mass migration and political infighting and instead highlight the plight of actual people fleeing their homes. Sourcing image inspiration from Getty photographs of refugees--along with photos of interview subjects our reporters talked to--I created a colorful, simple series of portraits. I finished each illustration with linework to help tell each person's story; a child behind a fence in a refugee camp, a couple attempting to cross a river, a teenager trapped in bureaucratic limbo.
Deep Dive: Privacy
For the privacy Deep Dive, I again wanted to make a series that connected directly with the heart of the subject, which in this case was the fact that issues of internet privacy ultimately concern real people. However, I still wanted to create a look that retained a cool, detached aesthetic. I took black and white stock portrait photography and segmented the photos in different ways to create a look that referenced computer-specific ideas like code and pixels. I then arranged them in alternatively uniform and messy ways to visually represent the loss privacy in the age of the internet.
Axios 8
Axios 8: Eight Races to Watch in the 2018 Midterms
For this project, which focused on specific midterm races around the country, the goal was to create a set of iconographic illustrations highlighting the hot-button issue of each race: the housing market, farming, illegal immigration, etc. I combined shapes associated with ballots (check marks, circles, lines) with a sparse pallet and stock imagery with repeated high-contrast treatments to create a full, cohesive set.
Axios Trends
This quarterly newsletter focuses broadly on the stories to watch out for in the near future. My team collaborates on setting a unique style for each, with each of us contributing illustrations to the full series. Below are examples of my contributions to various Trends newsletters.
