VISUAL DESIGN | INTERACTION DESIGN

The Texas Tribune Festival

Design for civic engagement.

Creative Direction: Jacob Villanueva

Design Team: Alfredo Palacios, Megan Hicks, Amber Huchton

June-August 2024

In the Summer of 2024, I joined The Texas Tribune as their Design Fellow. In this role, I pushed the boundaries of what I knew as design, collaborating with the Marketing, Events, Product, and Engineering teams to create designs that foster civic engagement and drive change. A great deal of my time with The Tribune, however, was spent designing for The Texas Tribune Festival.

Held in downtown Austin in early September, the Texas Tribune Festival is a platform for politicians, policymakers, journalists, and other media personalities to discuss relevant topics of the day, as well as for attendees to interact with and exchange ideas with one another.

As a design fellow, I created graphics across mediums for the Festival, assisted in the implementation of a wayfinding system for Open Congress, and led design research efforts at The Texas Tribune Festival, conducting ethnography, interviewing attendees, and journey mapping user experience to identify areas for improving guest engagement and cross-pollination of ideas.