Newsreel

I joined as founding Creative Director in summer of 2024, walking into a situation with no budget, a logo that couldn't be trademarked, and one clear brief: make young people actually want to read the news.

Challenge

User research kept circling back to a single word, "human." Young adults had tuned out of news because it felt distant, AI-generated, and impersonal. The brand needed to feel like the opposite—textured, warm, and deliberately imperfect—and the product had to make finishing the news feel as satisfying as finishing a game.

Solution

I built a dynamic brand system rooted in early-2000s digital aesthetics, with grain, texture, blurs, and motion that flex across app, web, and social.

Partnering closely with the PM and CTO, I shaped that system into the product itself: a swipeable daily stack of 3–4 stories with a clear start and finish, tactile reactions, and XP rewards that turn news into a daily habit instead of an endless scroll. I led design across identity, design tokens, component library, mobile app UI, the Framer marketing site, the educator dashboard, and go-to-market materials — so every surface, from a student's first swipe to a professor's weekly classroom view, feels like one continuous product.