Art directing March Madness

Project management / Art direction / Visual design system / Social media / Print design

Illustration by Helen Musselwhite

In January 2025, I was assigned to art direct The Post’s annual March Madness coverage. This role includes commissioning illustrations from a freelance artist around a central theme, and using them to create a visual design system across all of the coverage.

Project brief

My favorite part of sports is the sense of community. I love attending football and baseball games and feeling the energy of the crowd, dressing up in my team’s colors, and experiencing either excitement or disappointment during wins and losses. Sports can bring people together. I wanted to create a visual system that captured this feeling.

I hired Helen Musselwhite, an illustrator and paper artist to create an illustration to ground our March Madness coverage. I wanted to collaborate with an illustrator who worked in a tactile medium to make the system seem warm and human, while also hinting at the nostalgia that so many March Madness viewers feel for their own time in college.

I worked closely with Helen to outline timelines, review drafts and consult with others in the newsroom to create this final illustration to build out the rest of the design system.

Art direction

My initial illustration research, including work from many illustrators and illustration styles sorted and organized into categories.

In addition to the main illustration, I also needed to provide assets for six different stories. When constructing the illustration, I worked with Helen to build it in parts, identifying different aspects of the illustration that could work as standalone visuals. Helen created the illustration bit by bit, photographing the different pieces as she went, before combining it all together.

By doing the illustration this way, we were able to create a series of illustrations that built upon each other. Each individual one was a sneak peak at the larger illustration, and could be put together like a puzzle to reveal the full work of art.

Additionally, Helen combined pieces of the illustration to create a frame, which we used to create a logo for all of the March Madness coverage.