EDITORIAL ILLUSTRATION+

The Colorado Independent

Much like tech startups, nonprofits run on a bootstrap mentality. Everyone wears several hats. About 15-30% of my day at The Colorado Independent was spent on content creation and design work.

Rapid Editorial Illustration

Editoral illustrations often have to be done quickly. Since I was basically the entire marketing and design arm of The Colorado Independent, my time had to be utilized wisely. I couldn’t spend a lot of time on any task before moving on to the next action item. News needs to be published in a timely manner to compete for search engine placement against other news outlets who may be publishing similar stories. Additionally, the entire focus of a story could change in the final editing stage.

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All of this meant there was very little time between final edit and publication. For these reasons, I was often limited to a 15-30 minute window for creating illustrations. To do this I sometimes utilized pre-made graphic elements. This way I had a lot of versatility in design and was able to create high quality graphics. I drew inspiration from publications such as The Economist, The Brookings Institution, The Atlantic, and other mainstream political analysis/news outlets.

Lawyer Will Petition SCOTUS to Hear Records Case

Teen suicide epidemic on Pine Ridge reservation

Climate delayers are climate change deniers

Colorado’s 2030 bid has deep ties to Olympic boosters

Who fought for teacher pay during the 2019 session?

Now we know just how divided we really are

Farm Bill can work for Colorado if we take action

Finding accommodation among wildlife, growth, and oil and gas

Colorado should set bold climate change goals

Trump threatens national security by denying climate change

Colorado must better regulate the oil and gas industry

Thousands of dollars to process your public records request?

Protecting our climate is a bridge issue — not a partisan wedge

Amendment 74 – A Pandora’s box of property rights

HOUSE ADS

Event promotion

I created a lot of house ads for fundraising campaigns, events that we promoted or partnered with and much more. These are quick, small-scale projects.

Act Like a Lady fundraiser and party

LGBTQ+ Fundraiser

End of year donation drive

News literacy workshop

Bob Woodward talk / Q & A

Drinks & Dialog with the League of Women Voters

“The Post” screening and panel discussion

LANDING PAGE

Ask the Indy

I worked on several landing pages for the nonprofit news outlet, The Colorado Independent. Some were simple and straight-forward, like page I created for the Colorado Independent Voter Guide. For some, like the two you see below, I added custom graphics. Through Hearken, the news outlet connected with the audience and to discover and write about subject matter that was important to readers. The campaign was called Ask the Indy. I branded it and created graphics to visually portray the process. View the live page.

Live Election Results

Our election results page was aimed at a young demographic. I noticed that a lot of live election result pages have some sort of indication that the page is alive and actively processing new information. For this reason I thought it would be a good idea to create an animation showing ballots being processed. It was a large election with tons of initiatives and races that I separated using easy to navigate tabs. I spearheaded a team to update the info in real time using 3rd party software to create bar graphs which illustrate the results.

BEHIND THE SCENES

Masthead Redesign

For a while, during the process of redesigning the website, there was an idea floated to also redesign the masthead. The company ended up deciding that changing the masthead and the website simultaneously would be too much of brand transition jolt for the readers. Here are two versions of a design that was considered.