The Daily Dot:
Building Visual Brands from Scratch
The Challenge
When I joined The Daily Dot, the publication had a massive footprint in written news, but almost no consistent video presence or production workflow.
The core question was simple: How do you build a fast-moving, multi-platform video operation without burning through budget, exhausting the newsroom, or sacrificing quality?
My Approach
Instead of making one-off videos, I built a faster, data-backed workflow designed to capitalize on quick news cycles for a brand where 80%+ of site traffic came from trending stories.
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Use what’s already working: I analyzed site traffic to guide our video roadmap. Turning top-performing articles into video scripts meant we were creating content on topics our audience was already actively reading.
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Leverage the newsroom: Our trending news team was publishing dozens of stories per day. Rather than writing vertical scripts from scratch, I built a pipeline where soon-to-be-published articles served as our base scripts—meaning they were already researched, fact-checked, and approved for release.
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Build systems so everyone stays on-brand: Strategy fails if it can't scale. I built custom visual templates in Premiere and After Effects (Mogrts) that locked down our brand fonts, colors, and motion timing—allowing junior and freelance editors to edit quickly without drifting from our visual standards.
What I Built and Managed
Creating and Running Meme History
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Researched, wrote, designed, edited, animated, and voiced Meme History—a 76-episode YouTube series exploring internet culture.
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Ran the entire pipeline solo: took single-cell topic ideas from a spreadsheet and handed the executive editor back fully packaged, publish-ready episodes (complete with packaging and thumbnail options).
Scaling Short-Form Video Production
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Used site analytics to adapt trending reporting into short-form video scripts for TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts.
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Designed custom graphic templates (Mogrts) for our social team, giving them a fast, repeatable framework to edit short-form videos quickly.
Overhauling Celebrity Interview Formats
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Re-designed and re-launched our flagship interview format, The Internet Interview (featuring guests like Ken Jeong, Kristen Schaal, Beanie Feldstein, and Joey Sasso), evolving it into Dot Com Diary (featuring guests like Aaron Paul).
The Results
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Faster Turnarounds: Cut short-form video production time by 66%.
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Stronger Performance: Increased short-form video views by 3–4x overnight by pulling directly from high-performing written reporting.
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Expanded Output: Scaled the publication's video output from 1 weekly series to 3 flagship shows plus daily shorts, driving cross-platform growth and site traffic.
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Team Scale: Built graphic systems that allowed a team of 3–4 staff and freelance editors to produce hundreds of consistent, on-brand videos without needing constant graphic design supervision