client
Houston Public Media
sector
public media
year
2023
scope
Creative direction
print & digital report
showing donors their impact
Led by Justin as director of creative services at Houston Public Media, pre-JSG.
the
brief
Houston Public Media is the University of Houston's public media service and the only non-commercial, locally owned media organization in the city. Four TV channels, three radio channels, a website, and a podcast slate that more than two million people touch in a year.
The annual impact report goes to the people who pay for that. Donors, the Houston Public Media Foundation board of directors, corporate sponsors, and the program officers at the foundations writing the largest checks. Community contributions came to $13.3 million of $19.4 million in total revenue that year, and the report is one of manuy documents where the organization has to account for itself to the people funding it.
The 2023 edition was produced in-house, by the creative services team, with no outside design budget and a fixed release date.
The
Work
I ran creative direction on it and had final say on what shipped.
The design was a departure from anything HPM had published before: custom illustration, a lot of open page, and a typographic system built to be read straight through. That only works if the copy gets shorter. So the argument the team had to win, before any of it could be designed, was about word count.
The narrative came from Amy Rosen, a contract writer working from interviews across the organization. We asked departments to cut. Then we made the cuts that did not come back and defended them in review. The creative team ended up owning editorial decisions about what stayed, what got compressed into a caption, and what came out entirely.
The theme, "Embracing Community," gave the cuts a rule to work against. A page earned its space when it showed a specific thing HPM did for a specific person. Hot Stops, the investigation that measured temperatures at 21 Houston-area bus stops and found that 73 percent of readings hit extreme heat-illness thresholds. The Sugar Land podcast on the 95 graves found at a school construction site, downloaded more than 350,000 times. Houston Matters turning ten at Saint Arnold. The pages that were hardest to defend were the ones where the organization described itself to itself.
The team was challenged to bring something unique to this year’s report. Designer Chris Robinson’s illustrations brought universal representation without casting, a look that isn't PBS's, and the start to a reusable illustration library.
Michele Damato led the design team through all of it. The report shipped in two forms: a printed book, and a digital edition that the team worked closely with web developer Jared Counts to build. Open space and illustration behave differently in a scrolling column than they do across a printed spread, so they were built in tandem in a manner that ensured a reader holding a phone got an experience similar to the reader holding the book.
Production ran through the winter, with the file going through its last rounds in late February 2024.
Scope
Creative direction on Houston Public Media's 2023 Annual Impact Report in two editions, print and digital, from concept through final files, produced in-house by the creative services team.
delivered
Concept and art direction, including the "Embracing Community" theme treatment
A custom illustration program created for the report
Page design and a typographic system built around open space
Editorial pass on department copy: cuts, captions, and section hierarchy
Financial and by-the-numbers pages, including the revenue breakdown, donor and member counts, and matching gift totals
Donor recognition and acknowledgement pages
A printed book, press-ready
A digital edition built as its own landing page on houstonpublicmedia.org, designed to match the print reading experience
what
happened
The report won the Annual Report category, Division 1, at the 56th Public Media Awards, presented by the National Educational Telecommunications Association on September 15, 2024 in Columbia, South Carolina.
It was the first national award Houston Public Media's creative services department had won.
The department won again the following year, taking Visual Design at the 2025 Public Media Awards for the YouTube series Roots of Resistance.
what they
run now
This one was craft rather than system. The report was built once and did not become a template. HPM carried no layout system and no content intake process out of it into the following year.
Worth saying plainly. Design work can be excellent and still leave nothing behind.