Portfolio

This portfolio contains a selection of final print layouts for several of my National Geographic features. Aside from the story itself, what’s a little easier to visually appreciate here (as opposed to, say, a web layout) is the complete package—the myriad decisions that go into a deeply-reported feature. One thing that sets Nat Geo apart, from a design perspective, is collaboration across job titles and specialities. In each of the layouts below words were my work, and I wrote every one of them, from stories themselves to shorter text in photo captions, map legends and graphics notes.

But I was also involved in planning story coverage, choosing fieldwork locations, deciding how to visualize data. What this means, of course, is that my work was also much influenced by the rest of the team: first the photographers with whom I traveled, and then by editors, designers and fact-checkers. None of these pieces would have succeeded without that creative tension, the push-and-pull of people striving to do their best. No other editorial environment I know brings design thinking so thoroughly into the service of storytelling.