About Tonya Humiston
I make complex organizations visible to the people they need to reach.
That work has taken different forms — brand systems, data visualization, campaign creative, editorial design, executive presentations, design research — but the core skill is always the same: I study how something actually works, then design the visual framework that makes it clear to everyone else.
The instinct started in the U.S. Army, where I served overseas as a linguist. I learned to listen closely, synthesize fast, and translate complexity across cultures under pressure. I spent the next decade in technical apparel design at Marmot, Columbia, REI, and Toad&Co — building brand systems, leading design teams, and communicating construction intent to factories in Taiwan and Vietnam with the kind of precision that leaves no room for ambiguity. At REI, I was embedded in an enterprise-wide design research initiative that redirected the organization’s brand strategy.
Graduate work at SCAD in Design Management gave me a formal framework for what I’d been doing by instinct: design thinking, design research, and cross-disciplinary creative leadership.
From there I brought that approach into federal agencies and mission-driven organizations — translating policy and science into visual narratives at GAO, directing creative for NOAA’s national marine sanctuary network, and building the visual systems and editorial structures that help distributed teams communicate with clarity at scale. Today, through The Peninsula Explorer, I run the full creative process end-to-end and integrate AI tools into my daily workflow.
I’ve partnered with military and intelligence communities, federal scientists, university leadership, product teams, and C-suite executives. Each context sharpened a different skill. What holds it all together is design research — the practice of going in, understanding what’s actually happening, and building something that makes it legible.
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