From 2009 to 2013, I was Creative Director and Senior Designer on the Digital team at the Democratic National Committee and Organizing for America. Over three-plus years I worked across the full scope of what digital design meant at that scale: a complete website redesign, an evolving party brand, the launch of Barack Obama's 2012 reelection campaign, shareable social graphics that reached millions, grassroots advocacy campaigns, and the Presidential Inauguration. Every project had an immovable deadline and a national audience.

First, Senior Designer, then Creative Director, embedded on the Digital leadership team. I led a team of designers, partnered with outside creative consultants, and worked closely with the New Media team – writing, account management, developers – to ship work across web, mobile, print, and social, often simultaneously.

Democrats.org – website redesign and brand evolution
In 2010, the Democratic Party rebranded. Working with an outside agency, the party moved away from the stars-and-stripes motif and embraced a direction that reflected its identity: the party of change, forward-looking. I used the website redesign as a design playground for expanding on the new brand guide – making decisions about layout, hierarchy, and detail that would inform how the brand lived in the digital world. That work eventually fed into a fuller brand guide I created before leaving the DNC. The design principle was simple: clean, organized, function-first. Where do we want people to focus? What do we want them to do?

Obama 2012 – campaign launch
One of the biggest undertakings of my time at the DNC was the launch of the Obama 2012 reelection campaign. Working with an outside creative consultant, I led the design team as we brought the new campaign brand to life across the website, mobile app, merchandise, and the first wave of campaign print materials. The brief was both creatively exciting and logistically intense – everything had to be consistent, on-brand, and ready at once.

Election 2012 – shareable graphics
Shareable graphics became a critical communication tool in the 2012 election cycle. I designed dozens of them — infographics, convention quote cards, issue-based graphics, get-out-the-vote series — often in very short order. The work required finding the balance between visual impact, message clarity, and the speed of the news cycle. These graphics reached millions of people across social platforms during one of the most watched elections in American history.

Organizing for America – advocacy campaigns
OFA played an instrumental role in passing the Affordable Care Act, building the grassroots support that brought President Obama to the White House. I designed digital experiences and print materials for campaigns including the Healthcare Action Center and the Vote 2010 midterm campaign. The New Media team worked around the clock reaching out to volunteers via email, web, and social – I was designing for that urgency.

Presidential Inaugural Committee – inauguration website
The Presidential Inaugural Committee had just a few short weeks to create the inauguration website. Working closely with the developer building the site and the Creative Director who was still establishing the brand, I designed the full site in a matter of days – responsive across desktop and mobile. It's the kind of project that sharpens every instinct you have about making fast, confident decisions under pressure.

Designing for a national audience means designing for everyone. These weren't niche products for a defined user type – they were experiences for people across every demographic, every level of digital literacy, every device. At the same time, the stakes of every decision were high and the timelines were brutal. An infographic that went out wrong couldn't be recalled. A website that launched poorly on a key news night would be seen by millions.

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The other constant challenge: communicating complicated ideas simply. Policy, advocacy, fundraising, voter mobilization – all of it had to land immediately, emotionally, and clearly for someone scrolling past on a phone.

I left Washington in 2013 and moved back to Seattle, taking what I'd learned about designing for scale, speed, and diverse audiences into freelance work at Starbucks and Amazon, and eventually into the product design work I've been doing at AI2 ever since. The through-line is the same: design that serves real people, at the moments that matter to them.