California: State of Nature
exhibit graphics, environment, illustration, ai, database, non-profit
California: State of Nature is a permanent exhibit 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 panoramic sunset mural runs across the back of the exhibit, threading the environments together 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, and used Miro to map graphics spatially—catching redundancies and alignment issues early.
MY ROLE
Concept, Graphic design, Art direction, Graphic production supervision, File production, No-code development, Database design and setup
Illustrations by Always with Honor, Alexander Vidal, Muti, Sophie Diao, Jackie Fawn. Wordmark by Fabian Posadas. Exhibit design and development by the in-house team at the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco. Exhibit photographs by Gayle Laird and Nicole Ravicchio © California Academy of Sciences.
