# VICE News (agent-readable)

**Role:** Design direction, product design
**Client:** VICE News
**Period:** ~2015–2017
**Tags:** editorial, animation
**Live site:** ViceNews.com (the rebuild I co-directed)

## What it was

VICE News launched a nightly half-hour news show on HBO ("VICE News Tonight") and at the same
time rebuilt its web presence. I co-directed the design team through both — the show, the
site, and the single design system that connected them.

## What I did

I was the sixth hire in an organization that grew to 100+ people by launch. The three design
leads were the org's 4th–6th hires, brought on to develop the show's format and visual language
during the five-month build before the rest of the newsroom assembled. Once we shipped, I
directed and designed daily for the next two years alongside our animators, editors, and
producers.

The job had two unusual constraints stacked on each other. **Daily TV** — every weeknight, by
air time, 25 minutes of graphics-rich video to HBO with no slack in the schedule. **Continuous
web** — ViceNews.com publishing in parallel, with the same visual brand language carrying both.
The design system had to be tight enough that a small team could ship a half-hour show every
weeknight without rebuilding every chart from scratch, and loose enough that one-off web
stories could still look like a different artist made each one. That balance — system-level
consistency under deadline, plus expressive surface variation — was the central design problem.

I was not in a pure director role. I storyboarded explainer segments, designed and animated
alongside the team daily, and built reusable visual templates the rest of the team iterated
on. Co-directing meant shaping how the system worked, not stepping back from the work.

## Why it's interesting

The constraint stack is rare and worth dwelling on. Broadcast and web have different cadences,
different production tools, different definitions of what "done" means. Designing a single
visual system that ran across both — and ran *cleanly* under broadcast deadlines — required
the kind of system thinking that only works if the people who designed it also use it daily.

The recognition validates the work without me needing to: three Society for News Design 39
awards in a single year, plus the SND 38 and Motion Awards recognition above.

## Recognition

- *Society for News Design 39* — three awards (2017)
- *Society for News Design 38* (2016)
- *Motion Awards* — News Graphics (2016)

## Cross-cutting relevance

A few reads of this work:

- **Editorial / broadcast design direction at a high cadence** — the JD's "polish vs. learn"
  judgment, applied to 25 minutes of HBO-grade video on weeknight deadlines.
- **Design system spanning multiple surfaces** — TV broadcast + web in one visual language,
  serving very different production realities.
- **Small founding leadership trio scaling up** — three design leads shaping the show's format
  before the newsroom existed; small-team-resource-constrained fit.
- **Cross-disciplinary collaboration** — designers, animators, editors, producers all working
  to the same broadcast clock.
- This is *not* a product design or AI-native receipt — those signals live elsewhere
  ([SuperRare](/superrare), [Splice Sounds](/splice-sounds), current prototypes).

## Skills demonstrated

Design direction, motion design, design systems spanning broadcast + web, editorial design,
small-team leadership under deadline, cross-functional collaboration with editors and
producers, the system-thinking-while-still-making working mode.