It wasn’t my decision to leave Vox Media, but it is a good time to start something new
Happy Friday
Today is exactly two weeks since I and many of my colleagues at Vox Media received an email telling me I would no longer work at the company.
The following Monday, I found myself having to acclimatize to the fact that for the first time in seven years, I wasn’t fully immersed in Slack, meetings, or deep in work. It was a shock to my system and made me realize just how always “on” I had been, even when I was “off” during all these years. Now, the silence was deafening. As there was literally nothing I needed to do, I began to think.
The TL;DR is that though my time at the company didn’t end the way I expected or hoped, working there has undeniably changed my career immeasurably for the better.
Before joining The Verge as Creative Director in 2016, I was a photographer and a partner in a creative production company. Many years before that, I had worked as an illustrator. My career up until January 2016 had been marked by a series of pivots between different creative disciplines: I was an illustrator who became a sports photographer, who became an advertising photographer, who became an interactive creative director, who became a partner and a producer, and then a photographer again.
That process of change completely changed again when I started at The Verge. I was no longer one thing or another; I had to be everything all at once.
I shot photos, created illustrations, designed feature layouts, lower thirds for videos, and even a few logos — Circuit Breaker logo RIP. As time passed, I also made videos, did some voiceovers, wrote some posts, and even read some Drill tweets aloud.
In 2018, I moved from The Verge to work closely with the wonderful Polygon team when I became creative director of Vox Media Networks (before Vox Media acquired New York magazine) and worked across all the pre-merger networks. In particular, I made lots of illustrations for Polygon and commissioned many more. I designed more fun logos and features and wrote a few myself — culminating in arguably my proudest achievement to date: Writing a three thousand-word feature about how terrible I was at playing a stupidly hard video game.
While at Vox Media, I also worked with other teams outside of editorial. I built numerous general presentations; I shot a series of group portraits of The Verge, Vox, SB Nation, and the Eater editorial teams for the “Go Deeper” marketing campaign that ended up on billboards in Times Square; I led brand exercises with some of those same editorial teams to help them re-define and articulate their brand positioning. I even spent time working to help launch a new linear Vox channel on Roku.
In March of 2022, I moved out of the editorial organization and over to the Vox Media Brand Licensing team. Here, I led creative across this team’s six lines of business; I supported the editorial networks in promoting these initiatives to their audiences. I also worked closely with the licensing partners to create covetable products that adhered to our editorial voices and brand values. I loved the work and thought this role was arguably the best I’d had at the company.
Which brings us back to the morning of January 20, 2023, when everything came to an abrupt halt.
Welcome to Happicamp
Vox Media was my first ever full-time job. Prior to joining The Verge in 2016, I had been self-employed since leaving art school. So, this was also the first time I had been let go.
It was, and is, a completely new experience for me. But I do have experience of things ending. And when other things have ended in the past, I have always tried to ensure they ended as well as possible; I look back and then move on.
This is not the point where I write that this could be the best thing that ever happened to me. That could well be true, but I honestly have no idea. Time will tell.
But what I do know is that having looked back over the seven years I worked at a great company with wonderful humans, I think it’s time to take the incredible experience I gained from being dropped into the deep end of a modern media company and apply the skills I have learned to work with a variety of entrepreneurial businesses. I want to develop my role as a creative director and creative strategist to bring editorial-style storytelling techniques and strategies to brands wanting to engage with massive mainstream audiences across multiple platforms.
As my former colleagues will tell you, I dislike using the word “launch.” It implies the end of something rather than a beginning. I prefer the word “start,” which I think conveys a commitment to growing and maintaining something new.
So, I am starting a creative consultancy called Happicamp. I am already working with the DEFY MFG.Co in Chicago, a company that perfectly embodies the passionate kind of entrepreneurial businesses I love collaborating with. I am also now able to devote a lot more time to my work as a member of the advisory board at MobyFly, a phenomenal zero-emission hydrofoil start-up based in Switzerland, which is currently testing its 10-meter prototype boat on the waters of Lake Geneva. And I have a few other “irons in the fire” as well.
But it’s still early days. I am incredibly fortunate to be in a position where I can take my time, build a new client base, and hone some new skills over the coming months. So, for now, I am both looking back and looking forward, ensuring that things end as well as possible with Vox Media and working on what comes next.
On December 31, 1995, Bill Watterson published the final Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. It is arguably one of the best endings ever, even better than the finale of Mad Men — and that’s saying something. Bill Watterson made the decision to bring his time drawing Calvin and Hobbes to an end and went out to publish an incredible statement of optimism. I’d like to do the same.
Let’s go exploring.
