Q&A with Emma Kumer, SND46 World’s Best Emerging Designer

With SND47 on the way, members of the Creative Competition committee set out to ask SND46 portfolio winners to take us behind the scenes of their work in 2024. Emma Kumer is the inaugural recipient of the World's Best Emerging Designer award for her SND46 Individual: Social Media portfolio with The Washington Post. She won two silver medals at the competition, one for her portfolio and one for the Instagram carousel entry, Bird Olympics, in the Social Story Design (carousels) category. In addition to the silver medals, Kumer won four Awards of Excellence at SND46 for her digital and social media work.

Who are you?

My name is Emma Kumer and I'm a senior newsroom designer at The Washington Post, where I've worked for almost five years. Within design, I specialize in social media and motion graphics.

You are the inaugural recipient of SND's World's Best Emerging Designer. What does the award mean to you?

I really love this portfolio because it's a great representation of how collaborative The Post's design team is. I might have been the final step in publishing all of these stories on Instagram, but each piece in here was a collaboration with other designers. (Shout-out to my teammates Stephanie Hays, Hannah Good, Frank Hulley-Jones, and Hailey Haymond, plus commissioned illustrator Ray Dak Lam!) My favorite part of my job is working with their brilliant minds.

It was such an honor to be chosen for this title and I love the framing that I'm still "emerging" or defining my style as a designer! I think that's very true. I am looking forward to seeing my style evolve even further until my work is as recognizable as Fernando Baptista's. (Kidding! He is truly the gold standard for scientific illustration and to even be on the same web page as him is crazy.)

In your opinion, what is the perfect font?

My formal answer: There are no bad fonts, only bad use cases. My informal answer: I do think Georgia is pretty perfect. And if I ever have a kid, I might be naming them that.

What was the most challenging piece of work in your portfolio and why?

I wouldn't say it was necessarily challenging, but the Bird Olympics story stands out to me because I also wrote and reported that story with Hailey Haymond. We spent months compiling studies and talking to ornithologists before we even began the design process.

Once I started animating, it got even more intense. I reviewed slow-motion footage of each bird in flight and rotoscoped over it to get the exact right wing movement for each species. It required a lot of playing around with wing silhouettes and timing for the different birds to feel distinct and accurate. And I promise there are MANY After Effects pre-comps left on the cutting room floor! To this day, I think the Ostrich one moves sort of creepily - but to be fair, an ostrich moves creepily in real life too.

The thoughtful animations in your portfolio stood out to the SND46 judges. How do you edit your ideas or collaborate with others to get the animation just right for the story?

On Instagram, you're playing a constant game of catching someone's attention and using your limited amount of space and time to distill a complex work of journalism. I think animation is a visual indicator for people that something is worth a second glance - it shows we spent extra time and attention on a topic because it's important!

For each of the stories in this portfolio, I started by meeting with the other designers on the team to discuss the purpose animation was serving. For the tennis piece, for example, we were actually demonstrating physics. Motion was the point of the story, so I let it take up most of the space and get a little complicated. On the other hand, for the Sanctions piece or the Texas rangers story, the motion was more illustrative. Everything I did was subtle and looping so that it merely complemented the other story elements. And for Newsprint, which was our year-end review product modeled after Spotify Wrapped, we used animated text to add a layer of suspense before revealing data.

What part of the creative process do you enjoy the most?

The first twenty minutes of animating! Despite the many years I've worked in After Effects (including one year where I wrote tutorials for Adobe on how to use it), I almost never know exactly how I'm going to achieve a certain effect until I do it. Often, I'll see a finished video in my head and try to reverse-engineer how to create that sort of look in the program, then completely change the idea along the way. There's something kind of beautiful about the fact that, even with my whole repertoire of effects and sequences, I still never really know what I'm going to come up with.

(I say the first twenty minutes of animating because the last twenty are just optimizing file size over and over again. Boring!)

If your SND46 portfolio were a playlist, what songs would be included?

I typically listen to fast, production-heavy music when I'm animating, so right now that's a lot of Jean Dawson and Phantogram. (Jean Dawson has an album called "Pixel Bath" that I loved in 2025 - maybe that's the inspiration!) But I should also admit that I do remember that, while I was making a couple of these posts, I was listening to Animorphs audiobooks at 1.5x speed (the entire series is free on Spotify).

What is your experience with SND and the competition?

I've only ever been on one side of the process. But I look forward to the results every year because it's such a rich batch of design inspiration! Journalism is such a fast-moving career that you almost never have time to take a step back and appreciate the final result, but SND allows us to revisit our coolest, most innovative stories and their counterparts in other newsrooms.

In the future, I would love to volunteer or judge! I've heard such great things from my colleagues about being more deeply involved with SND!

What are you working on now?

As you may have seen in the news recently, The Washington Post underwent devastating layoffs. Over 60% of my incredibly talented design colleagues lost their jobs and, even though I wasn't one of them, it's hard to imagine I'll ever do work that compares to what I was doing with their brilliant creative minds. Right now we are just finding a way to survive!