A long-term project that I initiated while at Chalkbeat was designing a social media asset library. I set out to create a library of reusable templates to strengthen Chalkbeat’s brand identity and accommodate our quickly growing organization.

Client: Chalkbeat
Category: Social Media and Project Management
Role: Concept, Design, Production, Project Management

Research

I started by interviewing members of our engagement team about our wants and needs. Next, I reviewed analytics of our social profiles and conducted visual research pulling inspiration from other newsrooms. Then I lead a cross-department discussion and workshop with a visual sorting exercise and listened to feedback about the inspiration imagery.

Design

Taking multiple stakeholders’ feedback into consideration, I designed ~120 new templates. We now have templates for promoting events, articles, statistics and data, newsletters, quotes, call-outs, and more. These designs allow us to create graphics on the fly, which is necessary for a fast-paced newsroom with only one designer on staff. Here are a few of the templates in action:

Launch

These designs now exist as a resource in Figma. After sharing this work with the rest of the organization there was so much excitement that editorial staff wanted the ability to create some social graphics on their own. So I worked with our data team to build a tool allowing staff to create some of our most frequently used graphics (quote cards and breaking news) independently.