My work is a combination of design and journalism, and I use both to pose questions and share perspectives.
Alongside these cornerstones, my practice has a far-reaching approach where I seek to incorporate disparate ideas and novel techniques. It is a vehicle for me as a communicator and a means of inquiry.
I started working for news publications because I am driven to learn and share information; it is now the passion behind my visual work. I use design to educate the public, to engage social issues, and to provoke discussion. I try to make honest observations of the world to discover stories, context, and perspectives and then to share these with a mind toward
public-facing works.
In my current work I act as a science communicator, engaging the public, and most recently children, through installation-based work. This work is driven by my journalistic passion, my love of science, and is an outlet for my scholarly interests.
I have been studying the scholarly literature and theoretical frameworks of media effects to understand their implications for graphic designers. Design, though it has never been a truly neutral vehicle for information, is an increasingly overt participant within social media, and so I feel a duty to bring design scholarship to the table and to enable critical discussion on these issues. Over the longterm, my goal is to bring the perspectives graphic design to the communication research community. Graphic design holds insights and research questions that are currently absent from communication scholarship and which can help to inform and shape areas of research and the design of research studies involving visual communication.
Along with this contemporary inquiry, I also study the history of mass media in order to understand the parallels and significant differences of the new media environment. From my specific interest in typography, I focus on the history of the printing press and the cultural movements and issues that rose up around it. Every time communication technology altered the media environment, social and societal change followed. It is a persistent theme that came with complex and unpredictable consequences. Drawing from this history allows my scholarship and critical making to understand the current moment and to give concrete form to the problems arising within digital media environments.