Portfolio
Scroll down to view a wide array of my professional designs and multimedia work.
For UI design, illustrations, and more, visit my “For Fun” projects page.
Communications Officer
California State Library | Sacramento, CA | June 2022 – Present
My work for the California State Library is still growing and changing during a period of relatively rapid growth and change for the Communications team. I have greatly enjoyed learning more about the State Library, California history, and library work in general as I work on various Communications projects.
My role thus far has included:
- Upholding and documenting brand styles, colors, fonts, and more
- Designing other print collateral as needed (i.e. trifolds, invitations, flyers)
- Photography and videography
- Photo and video editing for print, web and social media
- Growing our TikTok following by 1,812.05% (83 -> 1,587) by changing our approach to TikTok and Reels videos (@californiastatelibrary) between July and November 2022
- Implementing a homepage design update by using Adobe XD and working with our IT department with the approval of the State Librarian (additional website changes/updates are ongoing)
- Promoting library programs and collections via social media
- Writing social media and website copy as needed
- Editing press releases
- Editing reports sent to the Governor’s Office
- Keeping files organized (including photos, videos, and original layout and design files)
- Creating our weekly staff newsletter via MailChimp
- Additional creative projects as needed
Below: Much of my 6 months (so far) at the California State Library has included getting organized, suggesting new projects, building up our photography and videography files, and working on social media. Therefore, design work has been somewhat limited, but I have included some of my social media work below.
Communications & Marketing Manager
Congregation Emanu-El of San Francisco | January 2021 – May 2022
At Congregation Emanu-El San Francisco (a separate entity from Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York, my previous employer), I manage the communications department and its budget. I am currently working to create brand styles and standards, create a yearly communications calendar, begin redesigning our website, create a social media content plan, and more. The communications department has been a pain point for years at Emanu-El, so much of my work during my first year has been re-establishing and/or creating base processes and style guides. I have already saved the department over $20,000/year by looking over past budgets and processes.
Day-to-day, I am responsible for:
- Creating, upholding and documenting brand styles, colors, fonts, and more
- Managing the production and printing of our 20-page monthly Chronicle
- Designing other print collateral as needed
- Inputting website updates and edits as needed
- Communicating with brand partners about upcoming events
- Promoting upcoming events online, on social media, via email, and via print
- Copy editing almost all of our print and web collateral
- Writing social media and website copy as needed
- Re-organizing our file and photo archives
- Designing and editing our weekly email (the Inside)
- Designing and editing other large and small email blasts
- Creating paid ads on social media
- Supervising and training freelancers
- Vetting, hiring and training new Communications Associate
To view an archive of our monthly 20-page Chronicle, click here. By looking through the archive, you can see a marked difference in more recent Chronicles created since I was hired in January 2021. Small changes preceded the full redesign, which took place in Summer 2021 and has been very successful, with both staff and congregants regularly commenting on the quality of the publication.
Below: Much of my first year at Emanu-El has been spent creating brand standards and organizing the department. However, below are some samples of graphics I have been able to create so far. Because much of my time has been spent creating brand standards and strategies as well as undoing parts of the old Communications workflow at Emanu-El, please scroll down to see more design work from previous roles! I will update this section periodically with additional files.
Communications Manager
Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York | March 2018 – December 2020
During my time at Temple Emanu-El, I helped to redesign our website, redesigned our Temple Bulletin, created a Temple Style Guide, created a new internal email newsletter, advocated for and created a new internship position, hired and managed said intern, and been promoted from Communications Associate to Communications Manager. I am generally responsible for:
- Helping to create, uphold and document brand styles, colors, fonts, and more
- Designing our bimonthly 24- to 36-page Bulletin
- Designing other print collateral like flyers and postcards
- Creating and updating payment pages on Acceptiva
- Copy editing almost all of our print and web collateral
- Writing pieces for print and web as needed
- Writing social media and website copy as needed
- Implementing and upholding a filing and naming system for original files and links
- Running our internal newsletter
- Running our weekly external newsletter
- Creating paid ads on social media
- Various temple photography and videography
- Supervising, hiring and training interns
- Supervising and training freelancers
- Vetting, hiring and training new Social Media Associate
Below: These are covers from recent Bulletins. I gradually redesigned our Bulletin once the reins were handed to me in Spring 2018, and I’m starting to like the visuals more and more. Though I answer to many departments’ needs and wants, as expected in a nonprofit, the redesign has gone over very well. Click here to view the Bulletin archive.
Below: Each year, I am responsible for designing a host of high-quality one-off printed collateral for the High Holy Days. If you aren’t familiar with Jewish holiday traditions, the High Holy Days are a group of several holidays that include both our new year and our day of atonement. They are, to be a bit informal, a huge deal.
I used my own close-up shots of the phenomenal mosaics in our main sanctuary, which were designed by Hildreth Meiere, to make these tickets stand out. In 2018, we had a very different horizontal design with various photos of our stained glass as the ticket backgrounds. I love these mosaic designs, though, because they are bright and unmistakably ours — from the mosaics themselves to the brand colors. While our usual font is Helvetica Neue, we use Avenir for some special occasions and for accents — so I used Avenir below to make these tickets stand out among our own collateral. I also used the pointed shape that holds the mosaics in other High Holy Day collateral (pages in our Bulletin, inside the High Holy Day greeting card, etc) to foster consistency.
Below: These are used as social media posts, as well as slides for a TV in the lobby. The ‘Speed Dating’ and “Ice Cream Shabbat’ slides were designed for our 20s & 30s group, called SAVIV. The ice cream illustrations were drawn by hand using a Wacom tablet and Adobe Illustrator.
Below: Designing flyers is a large part of my job, especially during the Fall, when there are multiple events happening daily at our temple. Each one needs a flyer, usually about a month out from the event, to hang in elevators and/or send to specific groups. The below are just a few of my most liked flyers, where I had time to deviate from templates. As with any design project, there are things I would change (the turquoise color on the Project Prom flyer is off-brand, the title font of the Chanukah flyer isn’t right, I should have brought the bagel photo down more to take up a bit more space), but overall these looked nice in our elevators.
Multiplatform Copy Editor
The Day Newspaper | March 2017 – March 2018
As the Multiplatform Copy Editor, I worked mostly on print design but also helped with website publishing/editing, worked directly with reporters, and sat in on many web analytics, social media, and front page meetings.
Below: I have included sample pages from both the daily newspaper and the Night & Day features tab, which was a smaller insert that I designed in addition to the standard paper once a week.
Copy Editor & Page Designer
NorCal Design Center (Digital First Media) | March 2016 – March 2017
As a copy editor/page designer for DFM, I designed between 10 and 20 broadsheet pages a day for between one and five different publications. We kept in contact with editors via Google Chat, used Citrix and NCS to organize and store our work remotely, and used InDesign and InCopy to lay out pages. I also used Photoshop and Illustrator often for hand-drawn accents and photo cutouts.
Below: Various A1s and section fronts from my time at Digital First Media’s NorCal Design Center hub.
