Serial Productions & The New York Times

Serial Season 4: Guantánamo, 2024

Illustration by Max Guther with direction from Pablo Delcan. Engineered mostly by John-Michael Murphy with a bit of help from myself.

The Trojan Horse Affair, 2022

Illustration by Lucy Jones with direction from Jason Fujikuni. Engineered mostly by John-Michael Murphy with a bit of help from myself.

Most mobile podcast apps are highly functional but leave little room for visual emphasis beyond small thumbnails and truncated descriptive text which looks more like a legal line.

The Times on-platform podcast presentation is a bit old, inflexible and did not quite allow for the emphasis senior editors wanted for Serial Productions. Before being acquired by The Times, Serial would produce full websites to accompany their podcasts but we wanted to keep it simple with a single page presentation.

My approach was to sketch what I thought the best experience could be for The Trojan Horse Affair but also keeping in mind that the page could evolve into a rough template for future custom podcast pages and eventually into a product and design brief informing a real on-platform solution. The benefit of building news products in this way is that you can test capabilities and assumptions in a real world environment where reacting to new editorial or business features is easy and cheap.

My hunch is after building 3 or 4 of these custom pages we could define all the use cases and inform the real product, if one is even needed. Often what we think is important at the start becomes less so as time goes on.

Outtakes and Prototypes

None of these sketches were really viable but I find it helpful to see how much expression is worthwhile and test how far the Times brand identity can be stretched. I also prefer getting designs into HTML as soon as I can — Trojan Horse Affair, Serial — to test in browsers and phones.