Illustration - Design - Visual Storytelling
For nearly twenty years across newsrooms including Reuters and the National Post, I've built the tools, visuals, and interactive experiences digital publications need: motion graphics, data visualizations, custom web interactives, illustration, and audio.
Visual storytelling is the ability to analyse a story and apply art and design to drive emotional engagement. The following collection of work reflects this instinct, representing a range of skills developed independently and in the service of clear and powerful communication.
Editorial Interactives
Question Blaster
Pokemon meets Question Period in this 2016 arcade brawler for the National Post. Built using Pixi.js and Adobe Animate. Nominated for Best Interactive Story in the 2015 Canadian Digital Publishing Awards
Kenney's Quest
A Zelda-style action RPG in which the player guides Jason Kenney through the Alberta political landscape — battling NDP goblins, completing quests, and progressing toward the title of Conservative leader.
Kenney's Quest 2
The never-released sequel to the Alberta political lampoon hit! Jason Kenney ends his quest, with the player's choices determining the outcome, features a fully rebuilt script built on Phaser.js game engine and branching narratives.
Real Friends: An Interactive Map of Drake's Collaborators
A relationship map visualising Drake's collaborator network on Views. It was designed simultaneously for print, desktop, and mobile, with the clarity and purpose of the graphic held intact across all three.
Built using vanilla JavaScript with Snap.SVG handling the relationship lines. The result was a three-person collaboration across their specialties, unified by the layout and the multi-format production.THe project was recognised with Gold at the Canadian Digital Publishing Awards 2016 in the Interactive/Data Visualisation category.
Illustrations by Mike Faille ⯈
Editorial Graphics and Illustration
Sonic Identities
I've produced the visual and sonic identities for a number of Postmedia podcasts. For each, I pitched musical themes unrequested, developed in consultation with producers on tone, then brought a finished proposition to the table. Every pitch landed as delivered.
The challenge was distinct across all five — national editorial brands with established audiences and tonal expectations, each requiring a flavour that felt immediately right and was unmistakably its own, with no house style to fall back on and no brief beyond a conversation about what the show was trying to be. A structural constraint ran through every theme: each track had to contain moments an audio producer could lift independently — intro stings, bed music, outro — without the composition feeling fragmented as a whole, meaning flexibility was designed in from the start rather than edited in after. All themes were composed, recorded, and produced inside Cubase, with instrumentation varying by show — synthesizers and sampled instruments throughout, live piano on select tracks.
Composing for editorial brand is a specific discipline: the music has to do the work of tone-setting in seconds, and keep doing it across hundreds of episodes without wearing out. Five shows, five distinct identities, five pitches that landed without revision.
Video
Pitch, creative direction and writing my own
Creative direction, art, animation and music my own. Narrated by Biden Hall with text by Bec Wake
Creative direction, art, animation and music my own. Narrated by Biden Hall with text by Sharon Kirkey
Creative direction, art, animation and music my own. Narrated by Biden Hall with text by Sharon Kirkey
Case Study 1
The Invisible Hand Society
When the Financial Post wanted to sell real NFTs, its editors turned to me to conceive of a campaign.
Mashing together NFT culture with the Financial Post's values, the Invisible Hand Society was born. The joke was the product: the absurd language of digital scarcity, the manufactured exclusivity and breathless pitch decks.
Every element was original, from the illustration series, copywriting, and the interactive build in Ceros, the premium canvas platform used by major content studios for branded campaigns. The campaign was pulled before completing its run after IP concerns were raised by estates of figures lampooned in the work. That it provoked a legal response is, in its own way, confirmation that the satire landed.
Case Study 2
Visit the Site ⯈
Visions & Mirrors began with a specific creative problem: how do you build a sustainable venture out of a 20-year career in digital visual storytelling and a serious fine art practice without splitting them into two separate things? The answer was to make the storytelling the marketing.
V&M is a magazine-like editorial platform featuring illustrated articles and animated, interactive scrollytelling narratives built in Instorier. It's also the showcase for original artwork available to buy. The blog and the shop operate together.
The design process moved from rough sketches into Figma wireframes with artwork leading. Bold hand-drawn visuals dominate the viewport on arrival; navigation stays out of the way so the story is never competing with chrome. The reader experience was designed like a simple game loop in which they discover a story, read it, and are then presented with a newsletter signup, original art for sale, and similar content.
Ghost handles the editorial infrastructure and newsletter; Big Cartel runs the shop on a customised theme; the full build was developed using an agentic coding workflow directed by Claude Code, retaining full ownership of design decisions while freeing my attention for the creation of the art.
V&M is the fullest expression of everything I do:
editorial strategy, UX design, illustration, animation, interactive storytelling, code, and commerce. It's a single self-directed project with a coherent business model behind it.