His work with The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, TIME, and others has been nominated and recognized with more than two dozen prestigious awards, including an Emmy Award and five Emmy nominations.
He lives and works out of a tiny bungalow in Rockaway Beach, NYC. When he’s not tinkering with design and programming projects, he enjoys cycling, video games, photography, making things, and exploring the world around him.
He does not enjoy self-promotion and talking about himself in third person.
The New Yorker (2023)
A sort of meta interactive treatment of an article on how social media turned the iconic film into a trending “aesthetic.”
The New Yorker (2022)
As an end-of-year wrap-up for 2022, I worked together with the The New Yorker’s Interactives team and their Puzzles & Games Dept. to develop an exceedingly fun (and often challenging!) digital version of The New Yorker’s iconic Cartoons & Puzzles Issue.
In addition to the playful hub page, a series of cartoon and puzzle pages were created as part of the issue, including custom interactive rebus and hangman-style puzzles.
The New Yorker (2022)
An absolute joy to create, this playful piece brings to life Liana Finck’s quirky take on parenthood through cartoon, picking apart the “conventional wisdom” and well-meant advice that all new parents are relentlessly offered.
It had been a while since I created something as mundane yet satisfying as a list filtering mechanic. The requirements for this project called for a flexible system where filters could be constructed through compound groupings of various tags and categories.
Like much of my newer work, it was modeled in an Airtable base acting as a combination CMS / API. I’m quite happy with the outcome, which possesses the satisfying combination of graceful simplicity and functional flexibility.
Vanity Fair (2019, 2021-2022)
A welcome respite from the heavier work I’ve often found myself doing, the three separate Vanity Fair Hollywood Issues I’ve had the honor of creating in digital format have continued to illustrate to me what can be possible when no corners are cut, few creative restrictions are put in place, and the entire process is piloted by a handful of incredibly accomplished teams.
Despite the impossibly aggressive deadlines and whirlwind of always-evolving (and sometimes competing) editorial, photo, and artistic directions, the end result is always something I’m proud of: a simple digital experience that is a pleasure to just use.
Vanity Fair (2021)
When Vanity Fair approached me for their upcoming story on the royal family’s latest drama, I was thrilled to learn that it was actually going to be fun!
The visual portion of the story centered around two interactive elements: the first illustrating the fashion legacy Diana imparted on her two well-known daughters-in-law, Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle; and the second highlighting the recurring pattern of negative tabloid press treatment toward both Diana and Markle.
The result is a simple but visually exciting story reminiscent of an analog photo scrapbook, attempting to mimic as much of the organic layout and feel you might expect.
The New Yorker (2021)
In a lot of ways, The Secretive Prisons That Keep Migrants Out of Europe felt like the sort of work I cut my teeth on well over a decade earlier, and the sort of work I’d like to do a lot more of.
Amidst the Black Lives Matter protests and the growing COVID-19 death toll of mid-pandemic 2020, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Vanity Fair partnered for their September issue, an issue containing the feature portfolio You Said Hope, an oral history The Great Fire, and a hub page sharing the same name to feature the rest of the issue’s content.
TIME (2018-2020)
Every year at the height of autumn, a small team of journalists from across TIME’s organization come together to produce the Person of the Year issue. This “inner circle” includes writers, photo editors, video producers, print designers, executives, and — for three years in a row — me.
Through a comical game of charades between those “in the know” and myself (who would remain in the dark about the selectees until the final days or even hours), the digital issue had to be designed, built, and tested nearly blind; the placeholder names and images swapped out for the real things just ahead of the highly-anticipated announcement at 7am, the final step in this arduous process to reveal the world’s Person of the Year.
With few exceptions, TIME’s long-running Person of the Year franchise has exclusively recognized men for their achievements. To mark the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States, TIME revisited each year since 1920 to honor the influential women whose achievements may have been overlooked by the male-dominated media landscape of the past century.
For more than five months, French artist JR captured photos, video, and audio interviews of 245 individuals from various backgrounds across the US as part of an extraordinary effort to bring all of their voices together in one enormous mural for the cover of TIME magazine.
Creating the interactive version of this mural brought me way back to my roots during the Macromedia Flash days, where the page felt more like a canvas than a document, and where the lack of rich ecosystems of libraries and frameworks meant that it sometimes required an incredibly tedious effort and a ton of creativity to create something compelling.
In Guns in America, this meant manually tracing the outlines of all 245 individuals in the mural. It meant hand-wrangling the data for each of them, and working to come up with the best way to let their stories be heard in a compelling and intuitive manner.
It was one of the more challenging projects I’ve ever worked on, and also the most rewarding. But more than anything, it’s an honor to know that I had a small part in the enormous effort involving many thousands of person-hours creating something that will help facilitate dialogue around one of the most divisive issues in the US.
Considered to be the “worst addiction epidemic in American history”, the opioid crisis facing America is killing more than 64,000 people per year and showing few signs of slowing.
TIME’s The Opioid Diaries was published using the same custom framework successfully powering the earlier Finding Home: Heln’s First Year, accompanied by an unprecedented cover-to-cover print magazine on the topic, both designed around a powerful photo essay featuring the work of photojournalist James Nachtwey.
TIME (2017)
From her birth at one refugee camp in Greece to her first birthday at another refugee camp in Germany, TIME journalists covered the first year of baby Heln’s life as a stateless child born to parents fleeing the Syrian civil war.
Pushing the envelope of TIME’s approach to digital storytelling, Finding Home chronicles their journey through the use of full-bleed galleries of pictures, video vignettes, and audio voicemails, all tied together by a story told through the dialogue of SMS messages between baby Heln’s mother and the TIME journalist covering them.
MediaStorm (2010)
Building on the success of Thomson Reuters’ Bearing Witness: Five Years of the Iraq War from two years earlier, Times of Crisis examines the events that led up to the 2008 world financial crisis as well as its wide-reaching aftermath. The primary driver of the experience is a rich quilt-like timeline of images, video, and various types of text-based entries detailing the events that unfolded during the crisis.
MediaStorm (2009)
The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake caused a tsunami that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people from more than a dozen countries. Five years later, Surviving the Tsunami: Stories of Hope was produced in partnership with the Thomson Reuters Foundation and IFRC to tell the stories of the journalists and survivors who witnessed the historic event.
MediaStorm (2008)
In partnership with Thomson Reuters, Bearing Witness: Five Years of the Iraq War shares the stories of the journalists and the work they produced while covering the Iraq War through use of video, photography, infographic charts & maps, and an innovative multimedia timeline of events.
MediaStorm (2007-2008)
Examining a broad range of topics from climate change, the 2008 financial crisis, and the crisis in Darfur, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Crisis Guide franchise helped change the way they present complex issues to their audience.
Among the many awards received by the series, the 2008 Crisis Guide: Darfur was recognized with an Emmy in the category of New Approaches To News & Documentary Programming: Current News Coverage.
Wholly responsible for my 15 minutes of internet fame — as well as my first collaboration with MediaStorm and subsequent hire — Iraq War Coalition Fatalities began as a school project in my senior year at SVA and maps Coalition fatalities from the War in Iraq across time and space. It went viral shortly after its release, garnering well over a million views in a matter of months and generating a substantial amount of criticism, praise, and discussion.