I am an interactive designer for Voice of America’s News Center. I design, illustrate, animate and write code to tell stories for voanews.com. Recent projects have incorporated comics journalism to tell the stories of ivory poachers and the wives of ISIS fighters, and to explain how the White House has traditionally secured presidential phone call transcripts. Prior to joining VOA, I was the senior UX designer for BBG’s Office of Digital and Design Innovation, where I contributed to open source journalism projects, illustrated books for Radio Free Asia and helped coordinate VOA's World Cup coverage. I started my visual journalism career as a newspaper page designer at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from 2004 to 2010. 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. @BrianWmson
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 new 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.
Portrait gallery
A collection of drawings, prints and paintings of family members and public figures.