Taylor Le shares how her boundless curiosity has powered her growth, from living in her car at 18 to leading the San Francisco Standard as its creative director, at SND47 Berkeley.
Date: April 24, 2026
Location: Logan Media Center, North Gate Hall, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
The 47th Edition of the Society for News Design’s Creative Competition, SND47, takes place April 20–24 with a week of events. The week closes with workshops in Singapore and Berkeley. This session will take place at the Berkeley workshop.
About this session
A daughter of Vietnamese immigrants. A precocious crafts autodidact who sewed Barbie dresses from socks. A homeless 18-year-old who lived out of her car for a year and taught herself design through magazines. An art director who landed her first job with a portfolio of unpublished work. A leader of a 30-person team at the Los Angeles Times.
San Francisco Standard Creative Director Taylor Le has repeatedly found creative solutions that have advanced her life, career, and work. In this conversation, moderated by San Francisco Chronicle Creative Director Alex K. Fong and featuring examples from Le’s portfolio, she will discuss how curiosity enabled her to create opportunities for herself — by uncovering possibilities in unlikely places.
That same approach informs her design and design mentorship practice. Le will also explain how she has navigated the startup environment at the Standard by evolving an existing design system to develop a visual approach that is both cohesive and impactful.
About the speakers
Featured
Taylor Le is the current Creative Director at The San Francisco Standard, where she leads cross-functional visual teams across editorial, product, and partnerships. Since joining, she has restructured departments, scaled talent, and evolved the publication’s existing brand into a more cohesive and recognizable visual system—all while driving meaningful changes in newsroom workflow and culture. As a change agent, she’s known for breaking silos, improving collaboration, and building systems that support high-impact storytelling.
Previously, Taylor served as Design Director at the Los Angeles Times, where she led a 30-person team of art directors and managers across print, digital, events, and social platforms. Her scope spanned features, entertainment, news, sports, food, Latino initiatives, and immersive visual storytelling.
Before joining the Times, Taylor brought sharp editorial instincts and creative systems thinking to organizations like Medium, AFAR Media, and San Francisco Magazine, guiding rebrands and leading process improvements across departments.
As Creative Director at Pacific Standard, she transformed a small academic journal into a nationally recognized media brand, winning a National Magazine Award for Feature Photography and forging partnerships with the Pulitzer Center, NOOR, and Magnum Photos.
With more than two decades of experience across Los Angeles and New York, Taylor has held senior creative roles at Runner’s World, People, Entertainment Weekly, and Fortune, and played a key role in building Source Interlink Media’s photo department from the ground up.
Taylor’s passion for people and process helped her develop an expertise in problem solving, resilience, and adaptability — a skillset that proves to be extremely valuable.
Moderator
Alex K. Fong is SND’s current vice president. He is the creative director and a masthead editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, where he oversees a multidisciplinary team of designers, graphic artists, graphics reporters and developers.
His nearly two decades of experience in the news industry has included leadership roles in newsrooms in the United States and overseas. In 2012, he collaborated on the redesign of some 80 daily print newspapers for Digital First Media, including the Los Angeles Daily News and the El Paso Times. During a four-year stint in China, Alex advocated for greater rigor in the practice of visual journalism and led the award-winning redesign of the Shanghai Star.
Alex has mentored journalism students at the City College of San Francisco (where he was once a student) and currently serves on the journalism department’s advisory board.
Alex is a musician in his spare time. He founded the post-punk band The Paper Tigers while living in Beijing. He builds his own audio electronics and has studied audio engineering and production privately at a recording studio near Oakland’s Jack London Square.
SND47 Berkeley is sponsored by American City Business Journals, the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
