The Client
Nicolé D. Combs is a six-time Emmy Award-winning Creative Producer and Director with more than fifteen years directing live broadcast television in Philadelphia. She sits in the director’s chair at NBC10 and Telemundo 62, one of the few directors able to move seamlessly between both stations and lead every regularly scheduled show, across English- and Spanish-language television.
Her career covers the broadcasts where nothing can be fixed in post: breaking news, election nights, severe weather, and live specials. She is a DGA Newscast Director, a four-time NBCUniversal GEM Award recipient, and co-lead of the Black Employee Network in Philadelphia.
The Problem
Nicolé was expanding beyond broadcast into wider creative, studio and multiplatform production. That move created a communication problem rather than a credentials problem.
Fifteen years of live directing is an extraordinary record inside television, where everyone knows what Ross OverDrive and a pre-coded rundown mean. Outside it, that same record reads as a list of unfamiliar job titles. A hiring manager at a brand studio, an agency, or a streaming operation has no obvious way to translate “directed automated live newscasts on Grass Valley ELC” into “can run our live product launch without blinking.”
A conventional resume made the problem worse. It flattened six Emmys and a genuinely rare dual-network role into bullet points that looked like everyone else’s.
The Approach
We built the site around a single idea: show the work, then translate it.
Lead with proof, not biography. The site opens on the numbers that need no explanation — six Emmys, fifteen-plus years, four GEM Awards, two networks — before any prose. The credential establishes itself in the first three seconds.
Borrow the language of the control room. The interface uses the visual grammar of the room she works in: a live indicator, program feed labelling, timecode, monitor-wall layouts, numbered sections. It signals fluency to people inside broadcast and reads as precise and cinematic to people outside it.
Build a translation layer. The centrepiece is a section that does the work a resume cannot. Each hard skill is stated in broadcast terms, then explicitly mapped to where it lands elsewhere. Real-time decision making translates to live events, streaming operations, crisis communications and incident command. Automation and control systems translate to product operations, AV engineering, esports and corporate studios. Nothing is left for the reader to infer.
Let the reel carry the rest. A director’s work is visual. The featured reel sits high on the page, muted by default so nobody is ambushed by audio, with an obvious control to turn it on.
The Build
- A dark, cinematic interface built for a body of work made in dim rooms
- Numbered sections mirroring a rundown, so the page reads in a deliberate order
- An achievements strip carrying Emmy count, tenure, awards and network reach
- A director’s reel embedded as featured work, muted by default with explicit unmute
- A career timeline spanning NBC10 and Telemundo 62, FOX 29, WJLA ABC 7, and Nexstar
- A skills-in-translation section mapping six control-room disciplines to their equivalents outside broadcast
- A leadership section covering her Black Employee Network co-lead role
- Full responsive behaviour, since much of this traffic arrives from a phone via LinkedIn
The Outcome
Nicolé now has a single link that does the introduction for her. It establishes the credential immediately, demonstrates the work rather than describing it, and hands anyone outside television a direct answer to the only question that matters to them: what does fifteen years of live directing do for us?
It is a portfolio built the way she directs — decided in advance, executed cleanly, with nothing left to fix afterwards.