Digital Pour-Over Sky Jackson

About

I'm Sky Jackson. Digital Pour-Over is where I work out what happened to my attention — how devices that once felt like magic quietly became appliances, and what it takes to notice them again. The coffee metaphor isn't decoration. I learned to slow down over a pour-over first, and then went looking for the same thing everywhere else.

By day I'm the Communications Coordinator and photographer for New Mexico's Early Childhood Education and Care Department, which means I spend my weeks trying to say complicated things clearly to families, providers, and legislators — three audiences who share almost no vocabulary. Most of what I've learned about writing, I learned from watching those messages fail and figuring out why.

I studied philosophy at UNM on the pre-law track, which is a long way of saying I spent four years being told, in writing, that my sentences did not mean what I thought they meant. That turned out to be the job. Before this I taught digital media arts, ran recruitment and outreach for a nonprofit, managed social accounts, and freelanced — shooting, writing, and designing for whoever needed it that month. On paper it reads as scattered. In practice it was the same work every time: find out what somebody actually needs to know, then get it to them before their attention runs out.

Those two things are less separate than they look. The job is about holding somebody's attention long enough to hand them something useful. The blog is about noticing what happened to my own. Expect posts on the tools I've torn apart and rebuilt, the ones I abandoned, and a running account of whatever I am currently getting wrong.

Where I've worked

May 2023 — present

Communications Coordinator and Photographer

New Mexico Early Childhood Education and Care Department, Santa Fe, New Mexico

  • Serve as de facto project lead for a five-person communications office through an extended director vacancy, coordinating deliverables across every division of the department, external partners, and executive review.
  • Rebuilt the office's request intake in Smartsheet — a 30-column tracker with automated routing, tiered approvals, and a metrics dashboard — replacing a legacy proprietary system and consolidating every division's requests into one managed queue.
  • Led that intake's migration to Freshservice as the department consolidated onto a single service platform, delivering IT a complete handoff package of eight service catalog items with request workflows, routing logic, and accessibility intake fields.
  • Designed and documented end-to-end production for the ECECD Briefing, the department's biweekly bilingual newsletter to roughly 50,000 subscribers, codified in a 17-page standard operating procedure covering deadlines, editorial standards, translation, review, and send.
  • Authored the department's three-part communications documentation set — Style Guide Quick Reference, Communications Handbook, and Communications Procedures — establishing house style, a declared WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standard, and role-based routing for every request type.
  • Produced a 38-page operational transition guide and five role-specific worksheets to preserve institutional knowledge through the January 2027 change in administration.
  • Established the department's accessibility practice: contrast-compliance matrices for the full brand palette, screen reader verification across VoiceOver, TalkBack, and NVDA, and a phased staff rollout plan.
  • Rebuilt the agency newsroom's information architecture and produced full HTML design directions; build and maintain program pages in WordPress and Divi, including new pilot program launches.
  • Serve as the department's staff photographer, covering agency events, programs, and leadership, and managing the resulting asset library.

January 2022 — October 2022

Social Media Specialist

Kirtland Federal Credit Union, Albuquerque, New Mexico

  • Owned the credit union's social content calendar end to end, from planning through photography, videography, design, and publication.
  • Adapted enterprise marketing campaigns for social channels and reported performance across Meta properties, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, and Yelp.
  • Managed all member-facing social correspondence, resolving service inquiries and escalations within brand and compliance guidelines.

December 2019 — November 2021

Recruitment, Outreach and Training Manager

New Mexico Kids Matter, Albuquerque, New Mexico

  • Grew the recruitment and outreach function from a single position into a three-person team, hiring and managing a recruitment coordinator and a training coordinator.
  • Recruited, screened, and onboarded ten Court Appointed Special Advocates, carrying each through background investigation, reference review, the full CASA pre-service training curriculum, and sworn appointment by a judge as an officer of the court.
  • Owned the organization's marketing strategy, including a full website redesign, a rebuilt social presence, and a multimedia campaign produced with the American Advertising Association.
  • Developed a partnership with Albuquerque's Open Space Division to launch a pilot program delivering Eco-Care Kits to children in the state child welfare system.

June 2019 — February 2022 · concurrent role

Social Media Director

Buffett's Candies, Albuquerque, New Mexico

  • Began as a freelance client and was brought onto staff after the initial engagement; grew the account into ownership of the brand's full content operation.
  • Created a cohesive visual design language, applied it across every social platform, and extended it to the company's website product photography, aligning web and social under one brand strategy.

2017 — 2019

Photographer, Designer and Web Developer

Independent Creative Practice, Albuquerque Metro, New Mexico

  • Ran a full-time freelance practice built on portrait, school, and wedding photography, with concurrent web design and graphic design work for small-business clients.
  • Held a six-month retainer as social media strategist for Pour Vida, an Albuquerque coffee company, building brand strategy around its identity as a small woman-owned business and supporting its expansion into local grocery retail.
  • Seasonal contract work with Kenneth Brown Photography shooting school portraits and supporting student yearbook production.
  • Continue to take selective client work on the strength of relationships built in this period, including a return to Buffett's Candies in October 2025 to produce a retirement tribute film.

February 2013 — January 2017

Digital Media Arts Instructor

School of Dreams Academy, Los Lunas, New Mexico

  • Taught photography, videography, and graphic design; co-led the art department and authored the school's visual arts standards and benchmarks.
  • Founded and directed a student and staff social media team responsible for the school's channels and web content, after serving as design advisor on the school website build.
  • Served as digital media arts liaison to the school's dual enrollment program with the University of New Mexico, co-designing dual-credit courses with university faculty.

2012

Bachelor of Arts, Philosophy — Pre-Law Concentration

University of New Mexico

  • Project and program coordination
  • Workflow design and automation
  • SOP and process documentation
  • Editorial production management
  • Digital accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA)
  • Web content management
  • Email marketing
  • Photography and visual content
  • Smartsheet and Freshservice
  • WordPress and Divi
  • Adobe Creative Cloud
  • Mailchimp

Say hello

I like hearing from people who read this. Corrections welcome, arguments more so.