Creative Direction

As Creative Director at Skillshare, a content company with over 30,000 UGC classes, I oversaw a full brand refresh, authored new mission/vision/values, and changed the approach to marketing.

The goal of the refresh was to appeal to more professional-leaning users, so we streamlined the logo, changed colors, and updated fonts. We also did a full copy overhaul, shifting our voice to feel more fun but also more authoritative.

Then, we adjusted our marketing approach: from SEO-based ads to creative marketing anchored around the classes and teachers who make the membership valuable for users. This connected the product with its audience and delivered value before asking for sign-ups.

From nice but vague (Everyone’s Creative) to emotionally resonant. The new tagline embodies the platform’s true value: when you make stuff, you grow in unexpected and wonderful ways. Being creative is about your whole life. It’s both who you are and who you become. 

Skillshare’s new logo, 2025.

Business &
Brand Strategy

Skillshare was trying to be all things to all people.

But, looking at the engagement data (how long someone watched, how often they came back, if they converted, one-off learning vs. habitual) alongside the size of the market, one thing became clear: we had to focus on creative classes. A narrower marketing focus and new onboarding highlighted just the most popular creative topics.

Copywriting

End-to-end strategy, matching voice and tone, writing for multi-channel campaigns, meeting aggressive deadlines, doing good research, navigating weird feedback… let’s goooooo!

A Cannes Award-winning video about the Morton Salt Girl’s 100th birthday.

Skillshare’s onboarding experience.

A book of personal stories from USAID’s partners: The Strawberry King (an exerpt).

An ebook for Bank of America and Equifax.

Taglines

Skillshare: What you make, makes you.
Skillshare is a creative education platform with 30,000 UGC classes. They wanted their tagline to communicate the power of creativity for personal and professional transformation.

Kia Motors: Form, meet function. Style, meet road.
The Kia Sedona is a luxury family vehicle focused on practicality and beauty. The target demographic really wants a performance vehicle but they have a family dog.

Interpark: We Saved Your Spot.
This parking garage company created an app for booking parking spots. They wanted their tagline to communicate the app’s function while feeling nice, friendly, and accessible — in line with their brand voice.

MoreBelief: Get the Picture.
This graphic recording company creates live drawings for corporate events, but also packages digital images for marketing. They wanted a tagline that alluded to the benefits of the work for elevating ideas, while communicating what the company delivers.

Ghostwriting

I wrote If Your Mouth Could Talk for Dr. Kami Hoss, a classical composer and musician, a renowned orthodontist, and an entrepreneur on a mission to reinvent the oral health care paradigm in America. He is co-founder of The Super Dentists—one of the country’s leading multi-specialty dental practices. If Your Mouth Could Talk connects oral and physical health, serves as a practical resource in dental offices and clinics, and has become a USA Today and Wall Street Journal Bestseller.

Information
Architecture

Content Rubrics
As the Director of Platform Content at Skillshare, I authored a content quality rubric, defining what “high quality” meant for 30,000 UGC classes across 12 different educational categories, each with different visual and instructional formats. The rubric included 23 indicators (e.g. authority, value proposition, visual variance, A/V…), each rated 1-5 by a team of curators, resulting in an overall quality grade for the class. Every class on the platform received a grade and these grades informed decision-making across the organization: business strategy (product-market fit, competitive positioning), messaging, content strategy, community guidelines, product features and priorities, site curation, search, moderation, trust & safety, community development, and teacher coaching.

Taxonomy
As a UGC platform, Skillshare has classes on a wide range of creative topics: creative marketing, programming, AI, painting, music, creative software, crochet, sculpting, woodworking, and much more. Developing a clear taxonomy with a logical home for every topic, sub topic, and specialty (Tiers 1, 2, and 3) was a collaborative 6-month project. Phases included market research, platform data analysis, teacher and user interviews, very large Miro boards, about a hundred spreadsheets, and a lot of creative thinking.

Content Strategy

A typical strategic engagement looks like this:

  1. A meeting of the minds to understand goals, challenges, and past work.

  2. A content audit and review of the existing strategic portfolio.

  3. A period of deep research. This typically includes 1:1 interviews resulting in a report of findings and insights (often with multiple review rounds).

  4. Ideation. Depending on project goals, this may result in recommendations for changes to existing content, ideas for new content, or a full editorial calendar.

  5. In many cases, I also help create the content I recommend, serving as creative consultant or Creative Director for the content team.

And just for fun, here’s a little foray into science reporting:
How Do You Use Bacteria to Save Bats? Very Carefully.