Greg Manifold and Brian Gross reflect on how the Post built a collaborative and relentlessly curious design culture that sustained a run of excellence across decades 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
Over the last two decades, The Washington Post design team experienced a prolonged renaissance. Just as the newsroom broke down internal silos, such as its digital team being housed in an entirely different office building in the mid-2000s, the design team evolved from a print-focused group into a multidisciplinary juggernaut that innovated across multiple platforms.
The numbers from SND46, the Society for News Design‘s Creative Competition in 2025, are staggering on their own. The Post and its staff won more than 270 awards and received two of SND‘s highest honors: World’s Best Designed for digital and World’s Best Emerging Designer for Emma Kumer.
This year, restructuring across the Post newsroom has resulted in a much smaller design team. While great talent remains on staff, the scope of the design team’s mission will necessarily have to change.
In this session, Greg Manifold and Brian Gross reflect on how the Post design team built a culture that was collaborative, ego-free, and relentlessly curious: the journalism values that drove the work and kept it grounded, the willingness to sacrifice individual credit for collective ambition, and why the people are still its most important development.
About the speakers
Brian Gross is the former Head of the Design Department at The Washington Post. He is a newsroom design leader focused on delivering impactful, engaging storytelling through visual journalism, with an emphasis on experimentation and creative risk-taking in service of readers.
For more than 15 years at The Post, he guided dozens of designers, developers and art directors through digital transformation and helped shape some of the organization’s most ambitious projects across platforms, including a series on the AR-15 assault rifle, an investigation of the January 6 attack and the Mueller Report Illustrated. That work contributed to two Pulitzer Prizes and earned multiple Best in Show honors from SND along with a gold medal from SPD. The team was also recognized twice by SND as World’s Best for digital. As a volunteer with SND, he helped scale the digital competition and coordinate a merger with the print committee.
Greg Manifold is the former Head of Visuals and Creative Director at The Washington Post. He is a visual and design leader with over 20 years of experience shaping how journalism is experienced across platforms.
At the Post, he led multidisciplinary newsroom teams through periods of transformation, aligning visual storytelling, design strategy, and audience insights to strengthen impact, relevance, and public trust. He is known for building and mentoring high-performing creative teams, establishing clear visual direction grounded in rigor, collaboration, and executional excellence.
He brings a holistic approach to complex, high-stakes storytelling, connecting ideas, disciplines, and teams to deliver cohesive work at scale.
SND47 Berkeley is sponsored by American City Business Journals, the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
