Everybody in the pool.

God, I hate silos.

That statement feels like a big deal coming from someone who grew up in the agricultural Midwest. Except I’m not talking about tall cylinders full of grain. Those are cool. I’m talking about the more jargony business-world synonym that means “humans cut off from one another, working away like there is no one and no other things that they impact or that are impacted by what they’re doing.”

Now that kind of silo has made a good chunk of my career frustrating.

It’s the kind that locks writers out of the ideation and experience creation process until the very end, when someone realizes they can’t push a site live with Lorem Ipsum all over it. The kind that says UX folks aren’t storytellers. The kind that leaves designers alone holding the bag as a site goes to development because they were the last to touch it.

I’ve hopped up on my soapbox to scream into the void about all of this before.

At the beginning of the pandemic, we shook our fists and proclaimed that every Edgar Allan writer would henceforth be known as a Content Designers and then defined our brand of Content Design as the glue that holds digital experience projects together from brand strategy to final launch. The whole cross-disciplinary philosophy underpins everything we do at EA now and is the engine behind our brand to build projects.

I declared to writers everywhere that the web is theirs to shape; that content is design on all those little screens we all spend so much time looking at. Y'all, there is a collaborative, cross-disciplinary party waiting to bust out during each and every web experience project you or your clients undertake, and design and content are the easiest to nudge onto the dance floor together. It might take some coaxing, but verbal and visual storytellers really do complement each others’ talents, and that waterfall project plan that has designers working on layouts in figma while writers are writing the copy that goes inside them in Google Docs isn’t doing anyone any favors—especially not users.

We work better together. As our design director Chesley Lowe says, “Everybody in the pool.” (I shamelessly stole that headline from him, BTW.)

Today, though, I’m even prouder that we’ve begun to create connections between even more disciplines that would have normally not interacted deeply on a project.

Case in point: UX Writing/Content Design and SEO.

For most of my career, I’ve regarded SEO as a shadow business going on behind and to the side of website creation—connected but separate and kind of a sovereign nation more than just a silo. But the goal of great content design and great SEO is to ensure real humans find the things they need on the internet. So, when you pair the two up and let one learn from the other, you unsurprisingly get some fabulous magic.

Ryan Ferguson , a content designer here at EA, wrote about it on the EA blog this month. It doesn’t hurt that the SEO team member he collaborates closest with is his brother, Michael Ferguson . Still, you don’t have to share DNA to find all kinds of inspiration in joining forces with the wordsmith, designer, developer, or UX expert next to you.

Buddy up. They can unlock your best work in ways you'll never know until you try.

I'll be honest: all this togetherness takes a little effort, especially for a company like ours, fully remote with people all over the world in vastly different time zones. It’s doable, though, with a bit of planning, intentionality, and grace.

• Plan for collaboration. We build time for conversation, meetups, and general noodling into our project plans. And though working together feels like it could take a lot of extra time, in reality, it’s one of those activities that creates exponential returns. A little togetherness in solving a problem eliminates ten worse issues down the line.
• Use the right tools. Systems drive behaviors. So, choose tools that encourage systems of collaboration that revolve around them, even. Back before figma or Webflow Editor features or even Google Docs with live commenting and editing, it was so much harder to imagine design-focused people working directly alongside word-focused creatives, working on the same thing in real-time…unless you were talking about a whiteboard or piece of paper. We move so much more quickly today, to real and to wrong, than we ever have, and now we do it together.
• Value kindness over niceness. This is a cultural thing we work on intentionally. It wraps together the idea of being a helper, remembering what we’re working for (connecting humans with digital things…solving problems for users), and the thought that niceness is self-centered and inward-focused while kindness is outward-focused. Nice smiles and nods. Kindness does the right thing, even if it’s the hard thing. And if you have to work closely with someone, tell them they’re wrong periodically, and shoulder responsibility together for something bigger than both of you, it’s a very worthwhile thing to practice.

Who will you work with today? And what will you learn or come up with together?