California: State of Nature

California: State of Nature is a permanent exhibit in the West Hall of the California Academy of Sciences exploring the state’s ecosystems and the communities that depend on them. I led graphic design end to end across a year and a half of development, producing more than 350 individual graphics in close collaboration with content, 3D, and production teams.

The central design challenge was range. California’s habitats are genuinely different from each other, and a single visual language would have flattened that. Instead, each environment got its own illustration style, drawing from a different visual tradition: travel adventure posters for forests, surf graphics for oceans, mid-century modern design for deserts, graffiti-inspired art for urban zones. A richly-colored silhouette panorama runs across the exhibit hall’s clerestory, threading the environments into a shared whole.

To manage production across that scale and a compressed timeline, I led the adoption of Airtable for deliverable tracking and cross-team approvals; used Miro to coordinate visual briefs and image research across six illustrators working in distinct styles; and mapped graphics spatially against 3D models—surfacing adjacencies and alignment issues that weren’t visible any other way.