Branding a new desk
I was a Design Editor when The Washington Post launched a wellness desk in 2022 named Well+Being. In concert with Senior Designer Chelsea Conrad, we developed the brand for this new area of coverage, which was a newsroom priority. We researched competitors, iterated on mood boards, developed a color palette, hired artists for recurring features and the weekly newsletter, and ensured stories under the Well+Being banner adhered to the established styles.
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Color: The Well+Being palette used a subset of colors from the Post’s main palette to distinguish its line of coverage from other desks on the site and from other wellness competitors. The result was a palette that reflected a softer-yet-authoritative mood for our wellness coverage.
Artists: We wanted to find artists who fit the tone of our mood boards and color palette, and matched specific content areas. We landed on Celia Jacobs for On Your Mind (mental health coverage), George Wylesol for Brain Matters (science of the brain) and Abbey Lossing for Well+Being’s weekly newsletter.
Wider implementation: Other Well+Being stories then used the colors and styling, whether for in-house and commissioned illustrations by Design, visuals created by Graphics, Photo and Video, or bespoke elements on pages with custom design. The visuals appeared on the Post’s website, mobile app and social media channels. Also, I designed, built and maintained the Well+Being’s homepage on the Post site using the Post’s CMS. The goal was to create a template that was mostly automated and easy for readers to use while meeting our design standards.
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Branding a multi-story project
I often helped the Design team at The Washington Post brand related enterprise stories to maintain consistency and familiarity for readers, and to emphasize the importance of the journalism. This is done via the type of visuals used, a consistent and intentional color palette, and custom design components. The Post’s Foreign Servants series from 2022, designed by Frank Hulley-Jones and design edited by me, implemented all of those.
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Toppers: Each story in the series used the same photo-illustration style, design structure and typography, and each story had its own color designation.
Downpage: A consistent design styling was applied to elements in the body of the story, whether it was custom info boxes, recirculation modules or footnotes.
Branding a podcast
The Design team occasionally supported the Audio team for special projects. For Try This, we supplied a series of illustrations created by Senior Designer Katty Huertas for multiple seasons of episodes. The work, which appeared on the Post site and anywhere you can find a podcast, won a Society of Publication Designers Gold Medal in 2024 for Podcasts: Supplemental Art.
