The design of The 19th — from our story visuals to our website to our brand identity — is central to our mission to make the news accessible to all. Two new colleagues will help us further live this purpose: Rena Li, who joins us from San Francisco as our new brand designer; and Vanessa Gregorchik, who joins us from Louisville, Kentucky as our new product designer. Both have already started!

Rena is a bilingual Chinese American multidisciplinary designer who’s enjoyed being able to “try a little bit of everything” in her life and work. Her formative years were spent in Houston, Shanghai and back in Texas again — relocations she navigated through art and a genuine curiosity for peoples’ lives. This approach helped inform her path into storytelling and news design. Her career in design has spanned industries, from creative advertising and art direction to “omni-designing” for a skincare startup. She’s been involved with branding, motion, photo direction, product design and web design, and more recently is studying type design at the Letterform Archive in San Francisco. She comes to The 19th in the hopes of aligning her values with an organizational mission and serving a greater purpose with her design work. Rena is on instagram @renal.artery

Vanessa is a designer and strategist with a passion for helping companies build brands and platforms that share stories and center their communities. In her career, she’s aimed to connect the dots between journalism and design; by the time she graduated from Northeastern University with a BFA in design, she had already led two student publications, a student-run studio, and had helped early-stage startups define their voice, expand their branding and launch digital platforms. As a design intern at The Washington Post, she worked on custom web packages for multimedia stories and was proud to work on a science-themed feature that weaved together photography, videography, audio and illustration from more than a dozen contributors. She most recently worked at Upstatement, a digital product studio, and collaborated with clients like MIT, Vanderbilt, Grist, The 19th, The Emancipator and Michelle Wu’s Boston mayoral campaign. At Upstatement, she helped evolve the company’s apprenticeship program with an equity lens and launched a new editorial platform that curates resources and mentorship opportunities for early-career designers. Vanessa is on twitter @vkgreg.

Please join us in welcoming these talented creatives to The 19th!