Selected Design

My day job is leading communications and design for EarthLab, an institute at the UW College of the Environment focused on equitable climate action. I've been in this role since June 2021, and over that time have led a major brand overhaul across the organization. When external consultants struggled to capture EarthLab's full complexity, it became clear the work needed to come from inside. I developed language that breaks our work into four action areas, then built everything else around that framework: a redesigned newsletter now reaching 33,000+ subscribers, an updated strategic plan, and two annual impact reports. The result is a cohesive visual body of work that is clear, kind, and community-focused.

The Nature Record is a national initiative working to document and elevate the role of nature across the U.S., building toward the first holistic assessment of America's lands, waters, and wildlife through science, storytelling, and public participation. Phil Levin directs both EarthLab and The Nature Record, and through that affiliation I contribute design work for them alongside my role at EarthLab. Working from a brand guide developed by Ode Partners, I've designed print and digital assets to match their visual identity, including a two-pager, a public comment campaign, and event materials.

Most recently, I designed the branding and coordinated logistics for two events in January 2026 around the release of The Nature of Our Times, a poetry anthology originally intended to accompany the first U.S. nature assessment. The Elliott Bay Book Company reading drew a full house and featured Washington State Poet Laureate Derek Sheffield.

The UW Climate Impacts Group produced a 91-page scientific report on greenhouse gas emissions to inform Washington state law. While written by scientists, it needed to reach legislators who could quickly and tangibly understand what the numbers meant to their constituents. I designed a companion fact sheet for WA state policymakers, working closely with the researchers to ensure scientific accuracy throughout. Rather than reformatting the data, I reframed it: late summer runoff percentages become progressively emptying glasses of drinking water; ocean pH shifts that look small on paper are recontextualized through economic weight. Like the Richter scale, small changes in ocean pH translate to exponential changes in ocean acidity, threatening Washington's $200+ million shellfish industry. Numbers are easier to ignore than futures. The design was meant to close that distance.

Future Rivers was a National Science Foundation National Research Traineeship at UW focused on freshwater science, running through 2025. When graduate students needed a way to share their research publicly, I worked closely with them to design seven exhibition posters around their own writing — spanning topics from tribal sovereignty to revegetation ecology on the Elwha River — built within the UW brand system. The installation debuted at the College of the Environment's spring awards ceremony, remained on permanent display in the Fisheries Sciences Building on campus, and was recognized as a brand success story on the UW Brand and Marketing website.

The Washington State Climate Office (formerly the Office of the Washington State Climatologist) is a small, vital UW office providing climate information and resources to communities, agencies, and decision-makers across the state. When I began working with them in 2024, their web presence was a single page that hadn't been significantly updated since 2005, and their name didn't fully reflect the scope of what they do. I led a full communications overhaul: designing the strategic plan pictured here, supporting a name and brand refresh, and collaborating with a graphic designer and web developer from the UW College of the Environment on a complete website rebuild where my focus was architecture and user experience. WASCO now has the external presence to match the importance of its work.

What does it look like to map climate expertise across an entire research university — and make it findable? I produced this event from first concept to final cut: 110 lightning talks across 16 thematic categories, representing over 55 departments and 18 co-sponsoring organizations across UW's tri-campus system. I also taught myself video editing to produce the full YouTube playlist, saving an estimated $25,000 in production costs. The showcase directly led to a $120,000 investment from the UW Population Health Initiative in new interdisciplinary climate collaborations, and a follow-on event series that ran through the 2022–2023 school year.