Portrait of Brian Williamson at Harpers Ferry.

I am an interactive designer for Voice of America. I design, illustrate, animate and write code to tell stories for VOA.

I’ve used comics journalism to tell the personal stories of women who resisted against Iran’s morality police, and the story of a man who survived Syria’s notorious torture prison. I’ve used databases to explore everything from trends in mass shootings to China’s development spending. And I’ve created animations ranging from a documentary on climate change in India to an explainer video on the athleticism of World Cup soccer players.

Every project is designed to be translated into any of VOA’s 48 broadcast languages. I work closely with reporters and editors around the world to create interactive, visually engaging content.

Prior to joining the VOA newsroom, I was the senior UX designer in the Office of Digital and Design Innovation for the agency that oversees VOA, contributing to open source journalism projects, illustrating books for Radio Free Asia and coordinating VOA’s World Cup coverage. I started my visual journalism career as a newspaper page designer at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I taught intro and advanced magazine design courses at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. I am a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where I majored in illustration.

I play the banjo.

About this site

This site represents the latest incarnation of an evolving portfolio and understanding of web design.

Each iteration has been a way to experiment with different technologies.

My first site was a Flash-based virtual View Master. Since then I've created table-based HTML sites, abandoned tables for CSS, and hosted a couple of WordPress sites.

My last site was built as a Node Express web application using a Google Spreadsheet to supply the data.

My current approach is to host the site using Jekyll and GitHub pages.

Jekyll provides a simple solution for baking out a static site. GitHub Pages allows for a simple and fast way to host the site.