CLIENT
The Cipher Brief
year
2023-Present
role
Creative Director
The Cipher Brief is the only media outlet focused exclusively on national security — bringing analysis, news, and interviews with government and private-sector leaders to an audience that needs greater confidence in what is actually happening in the world. The organization had earned serious credibility through its journalism. What it hadn't built was a visual system capable of growing with it. When I came on, the logo was solid and stayed untouched. Everything else, the typography, the color application, the way the brand expressed itself across pages and products, had no discernible logic holding it together. Fonts were inconsistent, color usage was arbitrary, and no style guide could travel to the events, shows, and digital verticals the organization was beginning to build. The site itself, a two-column layout that had grown organically over time, reflected the same piecemeal approach.
New York Times Brand Book
Cipher Brief Brand Guide
The frame I kept returning to was the New York Times expansion into verticals and live events — the challenge of taking a publication with an established identity and giving it the internal coherence needed to grow without fragmenting. The Cipher Brief was at the same inflection point: building conferences, launching shows, expanding its digital presence. Without a unified system underneath all of it, each new thing would pull in its own direction. The typographic answer was consolidation. I brought the entire brand under the Replica type family, using weight and scale variations to create hierarchy rather than switching between unrelated faces. The color palette was refined and locked — retaining the seriousness of a publication like the Wall Street Journal while adding a slightly harder, more technological edge appropriate for a media organization whose subject matter includes cyber, intelligence, and emerging threats. The result was a style guide that could actually travel: to events, to social, to the shows being produced, to partners who needed brand assets.
Brand System
The style guide formalized what had previously been improvised: type hierarchy, color application rules, spacing logic, treatment of photography and editorial imagery. The guide needed to be specific enough to create consistency but flexible enough to accommodate the different contexts the brand now lived in — a news article, a conference badge, a social graphic, and a broadcast lower-third are all different design problems, and the system had to hold across all of them.
Website Redesign
The redesigned site moved away from the two-column blog structure toward a more layered editorial architecture, drawing from the model of modern media publishers who organize content by section, prominence, and recency rather than presenting everything at the same visual weight. I led the design in Figma and worked with a developer on the build. The hierarchy of the homepage now reflects how a serious media organization presents itself — with clear section logic, editorial photography, and a reading experience built for an audience that arrives with specific things they want to find.
The World Deciphered
The World Deciphered is a weekly 30-minute news program modeled on the Sunday shows — a roundtable format focused on what happened that week in national security. The show identity inherits the full Cipher Brief brand system and Replica typeface, but adds a distinct lavender and purple palette that gives it a visual signature of its own without breaking from the parent brand. The color choice was deliberate: purple carries broadcast authority and a nonpartisan air appropriate for a show about intelligence and global security, while staying warm enough to distinguish it from the harder, more austere tones of the main brand.
Redesigned Podcast Thumbnail
Animated Logo
World Deciphered show intro
The style guide is the thing I'm most satisfied with on this project — not because it's visually exciting, but because it worked. Every subsequent Cipher Brief project, including the Honors dinner, NatSecEDGE, and the Threat Conference, runs from the system built here. When those projects look like they belong to the same organization, that's the style guide doing its job invisibly. What I'd push further is the web architecture. I designed the site but didn't build it, which meant some of the finer structural decisions were resolved in development rather than in design. Given another pass, I'd spend more time on the content model before moving into visual design — bringing in the various other verticals and conferences all under one roof.