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USA TODAY
Life & Entertainment
PROJECT SCOPE
Art Direction
Social Media Design
Digital Design
Audience Strategy
Illustration
BACKGROUND
At USA TODAY, one of the big segments of my work involves making social posts with the Life & Entertainment team. This is an exciting section, because life often covers the stories that form art and culture in our society, it's often easy to just pull from the story and making creative designs. Life & Entertainment has allowed me to cover stories from all sorts of different areas including covering awards shows live, to creating obituary galleries to creative wellness stories.
48 HOURS W/ USHER
HOW TO ENCAPSULATE A CELEBRITY IN A TOPPER
I love working with the Life team because they always have really interesting stories and "big gets" in the celebrity world. My first topper image that I made for life was for an interview with Usher, I was inspired by Photoshop, so I made the elements look like image editing tools.
This was our first time trying out a quote card animation, kinda like karaoke
Life's branded purple goes so well with Usher's visual vibe
TAYLOR SWIFT
SUMMER OF TAYLOR SWIFT OR YEAR OF TAYLOR SWIFT?
Gannett had hired a Taylor Swift reporter when I first started, so throughout the Eras Tour legs of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, we had ample opportunities to create Taylor related graphics. These would always perform well, and was concluded with my pinnacle design, the "13 best moments of the Eras tour."
Reading the review of her new album a day before album release was exhilarating
Pulled out my inner Swiftie to make this post, including watching the whole Eras Tour movie again, while designing
PREPPING FOR LIVE EVENTS
Awards shows are a great opportunity to flex my branding skills, because templates are always needed to report on the winners and key moments of the ceremony.
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The Oscar statue has one of the coolest silhouettes
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OSCARS
BRINGING REGAL-NESS TO SOCIAL
Probably the pinnacle award show of the year is the Oscars. Each year, i've tried to play on the fancy-ness and regal-ness of the Oscars, with the glitz and glamour, golds and blacks. For our coverage I always prep templates for winners, key moments and quote cards, this allows for easy day of work as we're watching the show live with the rest of the world.
You truly can't go wrong with the gold + black color combo
YEAR RECAP
2024: FINDING MY GROOVE IN DESIGN
2024 was my first full year with USAT and with that came more confidence in my work. At the end of the year, we had decided to recap some of the newsrooms favorite picks in a variety of things like sports, trends, movies etc.. With these stories, I was able to formulate a very loose brand that kept all the stories consistent but also feel unique to their own voice.
2024 was so "brat"
DIDDY ON TRIAL
DESIGNING FOR HIGHLY PUBLICIZED COURT CASES
With the Diddy trial, I was in charge of creating visuals for a wide variety of stories pertaining to him and his cases. The visual style I went with was a mixture of legal "mess" and vintage media.
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post about movies = design with popcorn
i love using copy and text from actual articles in visuals
as a big SNL fan this was such a fun project
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A DESIGN WORTHY OF CELEBRATION
Often with these listicle stories, the only assets you'll get is individual photos for around 10% of the entries. This opens up the opportunity for me to make main topper images and headline cards that allow for the gallery images to shine.
THE ESSENTIALS
CRAFTING ESSENTIAL GRAPHICS FOR LIFE
"The Essentials" is a recurring section of Life, where celebrities discuss a specific set of essentials they need for their lives. I was approached by Anika, our amazing Life editor to create a visual style for this, and we were inspired by paper collages and crafting. Each a variety of different essential sets, there's a lot of room to play with visual lists and quotes.
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VALENTINE'S DAY CARDS
WILL YOU BE THE TRAVIS TO MY TAYLOR?
USAT's audience team is always at the center of coming up with fun and engaging ways to interact with our readers. For 2025's Valentine's Day we created entertainment and journalism styled Valentine cards that went into print, social and online.
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again, 2024 is so "brat"
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I got to work exclusively with Spotify on this!
here's some of my favorite Life & Ent designs
shoutout to Anika Reed for always trusting me with her stories' visuals
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