Digital content

I’ve been involved with web overhauls as a digital content lead, working on stuff like content strategy, content design, web audits, comments on UI/UX, user research, and written words. When I’m not spending time on projects of that scale, I tackle individual pages, sites, tools, apps, style guides, or whatever. A lot of my work also involves rewriting things with the user and accessibility in mind.

• Leading the content redesign and refresh of alcohol.org.nz to align with its new audience, campaign, and goals.
• Leading the Faculty of Engineering as part of the University of Auckland's Web Presence Improvement Programme. I condensed seven websites into one, and thousands of pages into 200. We won an award for it, and I won many small trophies for always being first to get through my sprint stories.
• Design, IA, CMS build, and words for the Auckland Programme for Space Systems, Newmarket Innovation Precinct, Operations Research Union Analytics, and more.

• Instructional and UX writing, and microcopy on Small Steps.
• I wrote text versions of all the audio stories on Alcohol Journeys, a series of conversations about people finding hope through battling alcohol harm.
• I wrote and edited the web copy for a landing page for Kuīni, a chatbot aimed at helping wāhine Māori quit smoking.
• For six years, I’ve written almost all the copy, headlines, microcopy, buttons, and more for the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Engineering. This includes that first time I switched all the headings and buttons for Māori Language Week.
• I developed this Mātauranga Māori section (with a lot of advice and research), including this acknowledgement of painful memories.
• I was also the writer behind a lot of the dense study and programme information for Engineering. This includes classic/legacy study options that needed to be edited for readability as well as brand new ones that involved many instances of making stuff up.

Stories

This is a small sample of the many pieces I have written, with no bylines due to the nature of the job. In every instance, I’ve had to pitch or propose a story, figure out its angle and format, interview (and sometimes photograph) the folks involved, listen to my own stupid voice while transcribing, and write all the things.

• A longform piece on electricity grids and climate change.
• A piece for 2020’s transgender awareness week, which involved working with students and using Lego to explain good allyship. Years later, I was contacted to remove a deadname on the piece, and was told by the person that they still pass around this article “rather than explaining the same thing over and over again to people”.
• A piece on an absolute badass former naval architect who won two scholarships simultaneously in a very male-dominated field.
• A story on a super rad young woman who is changing the face of representation in STEM.

• Progress in the field of 3D-printed food.
• A first-person piece about mathematical modelling in the early days of COVID-19.
• Another piece on COVID-19 (spoiler: there were many); this one on applying disaster recovery models to the pandemic.
• This kind piggybacks on COVID-19 but it’s really about using new technology to figure out what’s in our sewers.
• Some pieces on Engineering News (a print medium!) on nanomaterials, robotic limbs, and control systems.

• I interviewed the Chief Executive of Engineering New Zealand and that was a little intimidating at the time (but he was very nice).
• Profiles/stories of graduates who have made it to the big leagues like Facebook, Rocket Lab, and CERN.
• I had a lot of fun talking to a mechanical engineer-turned-poet who also creates beautiful bird art.
• I proposed a multi-perspective piece about this internship experience and everyone was so insanely, graciously on board with their time that it ballooned into longform that was reused in several other places.
• Celebrating women in STEM and how they got there.

Communications and marketing copy

I’ve written my share of marketing copy for print (brochures, glossy signs, that paper inside fortune cookies, etc) and digital mediums (newsletters, social media posts, thought leadershippy blogs, etc). I was young once and have been paid to write to SEO requirements, but on principle, I’m against obsessive keyword-stuffing, buzzwords, and will always recommend writing natural, useful content for humans rather than machines.

I also did not want to create an entire portfolio section for generic design work, so I am putting them here.

• There was a need for a nice, glossy document about the faculty for fancy corporate folks, so I created the plan and concept and wrote all the copy for our first-ever Engineering credentials document
• I wrote the social media strategy and Tweets for Faculty of Engineering Twitter Account. I’ve written copy for their Facebook and LinkedIn too, but those were a lot less interesting.

• I had full reign of all our faculty prospectuses (new undergraduate and postgraduate ones are published every year) from 2018 to 2021 and have written every piece of copy, including the Dean’s messages and most of the student interviews. In 2018, I changed its formula to focus on research. This link is of the original version and what it became in 2018. Feedback was unanimously positive, including a Deputy Vice-Chancellor saying that it “looks really really fantastic. It looks so different, and it’s pitched beautifully.” It became the template for prospectuses to come university-wide for the next few years.
• I was given a folded A3 brochure to “update” but instead of just fixing the copy I decided to trash and redo the whole thing. The point was to have an “at a glance” document instead of another prospectus so I made it a single-page thing.

• I very quickly designed and wrote copy for some brochures, flyers, and business cards for the New Zealand Space Institute for their international spacething conference with the New Zealand Space Agency.
• I designed and illustrated some books for User Friendly Resources. This is one of them. Another one. There are more, but I assume their keyword search works or something and all my stuff was just more of the same sort of thing.
• I refreshed the design and layout of the Canterbury Food and Wine Trail prospectus. The original/previous version and the new, condensed version I made.

Academia

aka ‘way back when I thought a career in academia would be cool and fine for whatever reason’.

My shtick was mostly about applying narrative/textual analysis to internet memes and political comedy/satire. It was very Web 2.0. It also aged very weirdly in that these things are just really normal now.

Related keywords: online media, parody and humor, rhetoric analysis, play theory, fandom and pop culture, political culture and audience engagement, advertising, social media, semiotics, and Star Wars.

• The thesis
• The journal article

I’ve presented at conferences, guest lecturered as a Graduate Teaching Assistant, and have done several lecturing stints on how to write good and how to make your webpage not terrible (not the actual title) to final year Engineering undergraduates.

Play

This is where I have decided to put the wacky fun.

• When my flatmates caught COVID-19 and I was barred from leaving the apartment for a week, I turned my personal list of stupid band names into a spreadsheet, which turned into a stupid band name generator later that night. I don’t know if this is even appropriate for here, har har har.
• A very important PSA.

• I spent around an hour writing some copy/puns for friends at The Garden Factory.
• As the main communications/hype person on faculty for our Discovery Channel-featured BattleBot, I did two very important publicity interviews: the introduction, and the return.
• I wrote copy for fortune cookies. They were all weird research-related jokes. I’m not sure how well they went down because when we ran out of (hundreds of) fortune cookies, they insisted on switching to bags of jet planes and I was only allowed one singular pun. Here are some photos of those terrible treats.
• This isn’t so much about writing but I’m very proud of this robot homage to The Sopranos that I filmed and edited for a Twitter post.