Here's to better branding, building, and everything in between.

Hello there friends, future friends, fellow creative pros, clients, and folks we’ve met via the #webflow community! Welcome to Edgar Allan ’s newsletter - Brand to Build.

Every couple of weeks, I’ll be sending along a smattering of thoughts, links, and resources to help your organization have better stories, make the internet a more useful place for humans, and build more delightful things for these little screens we all hunch over.

We’ll keep it loose, practical, and just frequent enough. ??

If you don’t know me, I’m Kendra Bentle Rainey , EA’s VP of Strategy and Content. A frequent speaker, workshop leader, and writer on LinkedIn and Twitter/X, rambling on about Brand Strategy, Content Design, and all things Copywriting.??

What does “Brand to Build” mean??

It’s shorthand for the kind of soup-to-nuts, kit-and-kaboodle, idea-to-execution digital experience creation we love to work on at EA. It also nods to our nature as problem-solvers using digital things to connect humans with each other: A brand isn’t just pretty colors and a logo. A website isn’t just shelves to hang content on. And new technologies (Yeah, AI, and other stuff) are only as good as the good you do with them. Expect we’ll touch on it all here.?

So, if you’ve happened upon this and you haven’t subscribed yet, click the subscribe button up there in the right corner. ??

And finally, here are three things we’ve been thinking about already to get your brain turning, too.

Hope to see you around the internet.

AI is your frenemy.?

We’re a creative agency, so we’ve definitely spent some time wringing our hands over the impact and potential of AI on our work. But not much, honestly. We mostly just got curious and then got to work. Mason Poe (EA’s Managing Director) talks about moving beyond the information age to what’s next (and how to embrace the journey). More like this to come.

But did you ask, “Why?”

The way I see it, before you go off and spend months agonizing over pages, pixels, and programming languages, you ought to ask yourself some basic questions about that website you want to build. Four, in fact.?

F*#k around and find out.?

I did one of the most fun podcast interviews ever with my new friends at Huck Finch? Studio recently. It contains memes, pizza references, and as much joy as one can cram into a sound booth while talking about content design. Which, it turns out, is a substantial amount.