Audrey Valbuena

I currently work as a Senior Designer at The Washington Post, building custom, interactive storytelling experiences and reusable components for our team’s codebase.

My work has been recognized by the Society for News Design, the Society of Publication Designers, and by The Pulitzer Foundation.

I hold a Bachelors in Journalism and International Studies from Northwestern University’s and the Medill School of Journalism, alongside a Segal Design Certificate.

Work Experience

• Contribute to biweekly sprints to maintain and improve the Interactive Storytelling template (React); pitch, research, design, develop and test new components
• Serve as lead designer for site systems like the election results page ecosystemand story formats audit (building new storytelling templates in the CMS)
• Art direct, design and develop out component systems and story page flows for year-long, multipart story series, like The Collection and Scammed
• Pair with designers as primary developer on bespoke storytelling projects; mentor and facilitate learning of the Interactive Storytelling template
• Write and maintain Interactive Storytelling template documentation in Figma, Confluence and Storybook

• Design and develop bespoke story pages for sections across the newsroom: pitch design solutions, design reusable series components and patterns, and develop each story page in the Interactive Storytelling template (React)
• Contribute to Interactive Storytelling template: research and design new components, refactor components to improve UX and accessibility, and conduct informal user research to deliver insights on component usage and success
  
• Develop new workflows and template for design team: built out an internal Figma template, overhauled React template documentation and hosted UX office hours
  
• Educate around accessibility: held one-off accessibility audits for specific stories, present to newsrooms on best practices, and contributed to alt-text guides

• Part of the Design Systems team within the Subscriber Experiences mission, building consistency, accessibility and strong UX into the core editorial and growth surfaces of the New York Times
  
• Support and selectively manage product requirements, prioritization, roadmapping and planning of team's work
  
• Lead partnerships with other product teams to implement our design system's tokens and components in their products
  
• Own pieces of the team's most ambitious projects, like documentation structuring and color token implementation for dark mode compatibility in NYT apps

• Served as primary art director for the Business & Technology sections
  
• Commissioned illustrations across Style, National and the magazine, as well as crafted in-house photo illustrations
  
• Developed short- and long-term enterprise projects across National, Foreign, Style, Business and the magazine
  
• Collaborated across newsroom disciplines to generate, pitch, mock-up and design bespoke story pages
  

Certificates

Speaking & Events