Vassilissa
Semouchkina
Designer
Saint Petersburg, RF ︎︎︎ State College, PA ︎︎︎ Ann Arbor, MI ︎︎︎ Houghton, MI ︎︎︎ Seattle, WA ︎︎︎
Interdisciplinary design practitioner currently working as a field mycologist, professional truffle hunter, and foraging guide for Forage Seattle and the Truffle Dog Company
About
Exemplars in Global Health
︎ Account and design lead
Tags: Information Design, Scientific Communication, Visual Design, Design for Events, Design for Health, Publication Design, Account Mangement, Production Design
About
Exemplars in Global Health (EGH) is a resource for global health decision makers and was launched as an initiative under the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This initiative identifies, analyzes, and shares successful health interventions and programs from around the world to improve global health outcomes. The initiative is aimed at understanding how certain countries or regions have achieved remarkable success in addressing specific health challenges, and it works to identify key lessons that can be applied elsewhere.
Contributions + Role
As the Lead Information Designer at Cognition Studio, I took ownership of the EGH account, leading a cross-disciplinary team to deliver high-quality visualizations of critical global health data. I managed two direct reports and worked closely with a program manager to support proactive and reliable execution on deliverables across multimodal tasks and projects. Leadership responsibilities included:
- Timely, on-budget execution of quality design deliverables
- Coordinating cross-functional design support across 15+ EGH topics
- Overseeing budget planning, financial management, and resource allocation
- Team management, training, and support
Other responsibilities included but were not limited to the following:
- Executing and leading expert-level information design and data visualization across a variety of global health topics
- Design system creation and maintenance
- Bespoke web support to enhance user experience and engagement
- Managing the design process from concept to execution, ensuring that all visual solutions met both functional and strategic goals
Software
Figma
Adobe Suite (Illustrator, InDesign)
Flourish
Microsoft Suite
See More
Exemplars in Global Health Platform
Key Deliverables
Data Visualization + Figures
A significant and continuous portion of EGH requests relate to the creation of accurate, accessible, and bespoke data visualizations across 15+ global health topics. Figure data is parsed and deconstructed to elucidate key concepts and modeled to a visualization of best-fit. Figures are evaluated for accessibility and cross-cultural sensitivity, and refined to best support a topic and country’s bespoke narrative.
︎︎︎Conceptual Frameworks
These high-visibility visualizations are the primary representations of each EGH topic. These visuals are leveraged both on the EGH platform as well as across various presentations, event materials, etc.
Events Support
EGH topic teams frequently participate in global events, necessitating a quarterly update and creation cycle for event-related collateral. Updates and new material creation are completed during a two week sprint cycle and necessitate expert-level, high fidelity execution of design requests. Material types leverged during quarterly design support include the EGH program overview, topic overviews, country-specific topic overviews, evergreen collateral, and more.
︎︎︎Program Overview
The Program Overview acts as a granular encapsulation of the EGH initaitive as a whole. Lead and successfully executed the redesign of EGH’s most high visibility event-related material in August 2024.
︎︎︎Topic Overviews
Topic Overviews are created and maintained on a quarterly basis for all EGH topics, as well as research sprints and work in the planning/scoping stage.
︎︎︎Country Overviews
These deliverables are similar to Topic Overviews, with more granular focus given to the research progress of specific Exemplar countries.
Policy + Research Briefs
Briefs are multipage documents that narrow in on a specific thematical concern within or across EGH topics. Briefs cover a wide range of global health topics, but generally fall into the catgories of in-depth thematic analysis or the synthesis of insights across different countries within a topic.
