The Lily Founder, Editor in Chief, Creative Director, 2016-2019
As Founder, Editor in Chief and Creative Director of The Lily, I pitched and launched a publication out of the Washington Post with a mission to bring Post journalism to a new audience and elevate diverse women's voices. The name was a revival — the original Lily, founded in 1849, was the first newspaper in the United States written and edited by women.
I built the brand from the ground up, developing both the visual identity and the editorial voice. It quickly became an instantly recognizable publication, beloved by millennial women and well beyond. Every story published on the site came with a custom design treatment, and we never stopped experimenting — twice-weekly comics, murals around Washington D.C., an award-winning newsletter called Lily Lines and a community that lived on Instagram.
All work on this page was created by Team Lily, under my editorial and creative direction.
The Lily grew quickly and got noticed. Within its first year, it had accumulated more than 276,000 followers on Facebook and over 26,000 on Instagram. Coverage from Nieman Lab, Poynter, Digiday and the Society for News Design took note of what we were building — a publication with a distinct visual identity and editorial voice that didn't look or sound like anything else coming out of a major newsroom.
The Lily was bringing in a younger and more diverse audience than the Washington Post itself, which was exactly the point. We were a proof of concept — that you could take serious journalism, package it thoughtfully for a specific audience, and build something people actually wanted to be part of. In 2022, the Post folded The Lily into its broader coverage, a recognition that what we had built had become central enough to the Post's identity that it belonged at the core of the newsroom.
From the start, the visual identity was as central as the editorial mission. We were competing for attention in crowded social feeds, so I made sure The Lily had a look that was instantly recognizable. We developed a restrained black and white color scheme with a limited range of accent colors, deliberately different from the pastel-heavy aesthetic common to publications aimed at women at the time. Every story published on the site came with a custom image built specifically for the platform it was being published on.
We worked with over 170 female illustrators and had weekly design check-ins to constantly refine and push the aesthetic. The Instagram grid maintained a strict alternating pattern of black and white backgrounds, making the brand immediately recognizable the moment you encountered it in your feed. The editorial voice got the same level of attention. We looked at what everyone else was doing and deliberately did something different, including banning the tired phrases and punctuation habits that had become clichés in women's media.
We were named one of six finalists in the Society for News Design's World's Best Designed category. In our first year, we won a Webby for best email newsletter for Lily Lines.
Read my Lily launch letter here.
More Lily projects here.
Lily covered in the news here.