Melissa Miller
Creative Director
Melissa is a quintessential Gemini who leads with curiosity, loves a good creative exchange, and will happily debate every side of an idea. However she will always argue that print is not dead.
A creative director and editorial designer with two decades of experience, Melissa has built her career around making publications impossible to ignore. She brings together editorial design, art direction, and marketing experience to create work that grabs attention, evokes emotion, and tells a story.
At Therium, she believes great magazine design is more than beautiful spreads. It’s storytelling, pacing, typography, photography, hierarchy, and the moments that make a reader stop, look, and keep turning the page. Her experience spans magazine launches and redesigns, editorial systems, photography art direction, visual concepts, and production for national brands, associations, nonprofits, healthcare organizations, and arts and culture institutions.
Her work has earned recognition from the Content Marketing Awards, MarCom, Folio, and Azbee Awards, including Gold for Magazine Launch and Best Publication Design. Over her career, she’s designed and art directed more than 22 magazine titles.
Melissa also firmly believes the special sauce is the team. Bring together talented writers, photographers, illustrators, editors, designers, and strategists. Give their passions room to shine, and the result can be pretty magical.
Melissa originally thought she’d become a museum exhibition designer, creating multisensory experiences that lead people through a story or idea. She earned her M.A. from George Washington University, focusing on how color, space, and graphics influence information comprehension.
Her first real design job, in the creative department at Kiplinger Magazine, changed everything. She had an ah-ha moment: this was her medium. She took a left turn into editorial and marketing design—and never looked back.
