COMPANY
Currant
Currant is a global media collective—think artsy, techy publication and community—paving a better food future.
staycurrant.com
SERVICES
Brand Strategy
Marketing & Comms Strategy
Content, Copywriting, & Editing
Community & Audience Dev
Digital Design & Production
Org Design, People, & Operations
ROLE
As the founder, I'm equal parts design editor and copywriter, business strategist and organizational designer, partnerships lead and audience analyst.
Brand Identity & Design
Pre-launch, I workshopped our visual style, logo, and typeface pairing with creative studio Unspoken Agreement, who graciously custom crafted our logo. Post-launch, I define and refine creative vision with our in-house graphic designer. This covers: assigning briefs and specs, providing art direction and feedback, and reviewing creative proposals for special projects. It's a hyper-iterative process— our brand identity expands in real-time as our content ambitions and production capabilities grow. Doubling as our web designer and marketer, I apply branding across the website, adhering to both UX (flow! consistency!) and marketing priorities (banners! CTAs!). I also dabble in front-end code.
Brand Purpose & Differentiation
As any organization asks itself at the beginning: Who are we? What's our purpose? Why us? I love this part: laying all the messy thoughts out, digging into the truth of why we exist, and anchoring the stories (read: content) to come. You could call this the GV design sprint, or the rapidfire sticky note brainstorming phase.
Brand Guidelines
Next step: pruning the unruly brain dumps. Here, I took our mission and operating ethos—as articulated in the above big-picture brainstorm—and translated it into our brand guide, outlining parameters for our visual and verbal communications. For fun, I fashioned a public manifesto out of it.
Marketing & Communications Strategy
Knowing that audience habits and interests differ across platforms, I tailor our marketing strategy and engagement rituals to the unique functions across web, email, and social community channels.
Content Strategy
While we publish on food—a wide and relatable topic—we differentiate by our multidisciplinary angle, reporting in holistic context of culture and history, chefs and hospitality, tech and business, health and nutrition, policy and ecology, and design and fashion. Here's the big picture manifesto behind why we publish.
Audience education and demand generation drive our editorial goals and priorities, given that we often publish on emerging topics and figures. This requires constant balancing and assessing: How might we leverage familiarity to expose readers to new ways of thinking? How do we explain, visualize, and delight—while maintaining our edge?
To operationally support, I built out database systems for research, tagging, tracking, and project managing alongside larger marketing metrics and timelines.
Copywriting & Editing
I write all brand copy. It's a constant exercise in refining and unifying business priorities, marketing strategy, and brand guidelines. This spans all short and medium length writing from website UX copy, SEO optimized article descriptions, press announcements, onboarding and recruiting guides, social media captions, and more.
On the editorial and longform side, I report on original industry analysis for our newsletter and contribute the occassional journalistic piece (2000-4000 words), one of which was featured by Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab. I design and visually edit all of our web pieces—incorporating words, photos, audio snippets, mobile-friendly videos, and code, in service of producing interactive reading experiences to deepen audience engagement. Here's an example.
Audience Development & Community Design
Currant's unique angle and style of reporting has cultivated a multidisciplinary community passionate about exploring food in deeper ways, distributed across the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Our subscribers, followers, and Discord members span: designers from the Googles and Apples of the world, food critics from the SF Chronicles and WaPos, and strategists from creative agencies small and large. (Also dentists, scholars, grassroots organizers, and beyond.)