The Shortlist Episode 65: What Comes First, Design or Content?

A frequent debate for AEC Marketers is the classic “chicken or the egg” question: which comes first—design or content? In Episode 65 of The Shortlist, Wendy Simmons is joined by Middle of Six’s Senior Creative Strategist Becky Ellison and Marketing Strategist Kyle Davis to explore both sides of the discussion. Should content shape the design, ensuring a clear and structured message? Or should design lead the way, providing a framework for content to fit into?

This ongoing debate plays out in marketing teams every day, influencing how proposals, presentations, and branding materials come to life. Wendy, Becky, and Kyle share their insights, experiences, and practical approaches for tackling this challenge. Whether you're a designer, writer, or marketer, this conversation offers insightful takeaways through a heated and humorous discussion that just might help you solve this age-old dilemma!

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Podcast Transcript

Welcome to The Shortlist.

We're exploring all things AEC marketing to help your firm win The Shortlist.

I'm Wendy Simmons, and today we're talking with Middle of Six senior creative strategist, Becky Ellison, and marketing strategist, Kyle Davis, to discuss the eternal question, which comes first, design or content?

Or as we will say a few times in this episode, the chicken or the egg dilemma here.

Hey Kyle, hi Becky.

Chicken or the egg?

Hey, hey.

Hello, hello.

Team chicken, I don't know what that means.

Team chicken.

Team egg.

All right, now I'm going to have to try to keep that straight through the whole episode.

Yeah.

No, no, don't hold us to it.

I know you are both dying to dig into this, and we want to get into the topic, but we love to start up with a warm up question first.

And it's Friday, we're recording on a lovely fall Friday.

What have you been doing this week?

What's going on?

And do any of your projects kind of, were they inspiration for this chicken or the egg related to design or content?

Yeah, I feel like I have been working on some very appropriate tasks and projects.

One of them being a proposal that is basically all content at this point.

And then also doing one of my favorite projects, which is sort of a mid-sized website project where I am kind of judge, jury and executioner all at once.

More like designer, content writer, project manager, etc.

So really good blend of content and design going on in my world right now.

So it's fresh.

It's fresh.

You're ready to go.

Becky, what about you?

You know, I'm working on a couple of, I'll call them smaller proposals.

So not a lot of drama in terms of content, the chicken or egg or design versus content there.

Although my most intense project probably right now is a proposal template that I'm doing for a client, which probably undermines my argument because it's like kind of by its essence, designed before content.

Yeah, it does.

But, you know, as a template, that's what it's for.

Note to self, bring that up later.

But yeah, there will be no real content that I have to input into this document.

Therefore, it doesn't matter.

So still team chicken or egg, whichever one is designed after content.

But so yeah, I'm working on, yeah, template, some proposals, a rebrand.

No big deal, you know, just a typical week in the day of the life of a Middle of Six designer.

I love that both of you have been working on projects that support and refute your case that you're about to make here.

This is perfect.

It's going to be completely confusing to everyone, all of our listeners.

And if you're not following exactly what we're getting at, today's topic is about, you know, which one comes first?

Do you need the design so that you can create content that fits and works in a beautiful design or a design that makes sure that you are creating a document or whatever it is going to be that checks all the boxes?

Do you start with what the form needs to be or do you start with the content?

Do you need to think through and develop all of your points and understand where you're going to go, get that road map built out and then design around it?

And there are arguments on both sides for days.

We're not going to spend that much time on it, but we just thought it would be an interesting conversation to include our listeners on.

We have it internally often when we are assigned a new project and are trying to figure out who's going to start with that project or who's going to kick it off.

And that argument of, do we have the content?

Do we have the design?

Comes up all the time.

Well, I'm just waiting on content.

Well, I'm just waiting on design and then I can get started.

No big deal.

I'm sure that happens in-house as well.

I was a marketing design manager early in my career.

And all the times I was asked to design something without any content, it was a head scratcher.

So I'm going to try to stay neutral through this conversation.

I am Switzerland here.

I'm just going to not interject my opinion too much and to see what Kyle and Becky have to say since you both technically do sit in very distinct writer roles and designer roles, but it blends in the middle a little bit.

So, Becky, we're going to start with you.

You have to be brave and go first here.

I want to know what your top reason is that you would say we need to start with the content.

You know, you're the designer, so you're asking for the content.

Tell me why.

For the same reason that you should build the house before you paint it, Wendy.

Wow, coming in hot.

Design by its nature is done to augment content, you know, to present the content in a meaningful, attractive and illuminating way.

So, you know, if I put together a storyboard or, you know, a wire frame, whatever you want to call it, with placeholders and text boxes and all that, and then, you know, the text content ends up being half that length with, like, three extra pages of info graphics and an org chart, then, like, then all my wire framing was for nothing.

You know, like, I'd rather have the content that we are actually presenting so that my design work is custom-tailored to what is actually being shown, because, like, otherwise, we're all just wasting time, you know?

Like, I mean, I get that, like, some people need visual organization tools to help them, you know, conceptualize what they want to do with the available space, but, like, if it's just me making it up from my imagination, it's literally useless.

My main argument here is that I think good design is custom, and buying necessity has to be responsive to the content.

Otherwise, we're all just human Canva templates.

I love that.

Are you imagining a proposal when you're answering this question?

I'm just curious.

Yeah, nine times out of ten, yes, that is what I'm thinking of.

I've already anticipated this.

I feel like Becky's thinking proposal and I'm thinking website, so we might actually have more common ground than we think, but that doesn't mean that we're not going to argue anyway.

All right, please, arguing is way more interesting to listen to.

Like, for instance, have you ever say, like, put trim in a house or built a fence or anything like that, where it actually is more efficient and more time effective to actually paint the boards, let them dry, put on your second coat, slap them up, staple, staple, you're done.

There's no painting that you've painted the house before you built it.

Come on now.

Kyle, I'm a millennial.

I'm never going to own a house.

I think I would get in trouble if I did any of that to my apartment.

The thing is, we're putting the cart before the horse.

We're putting the paint before the house.

We're making stuff up.

There's like, if there's no content, then we're just, we're designing nothing.

We might as well just be like finger painting on the wall.

What are we even doing?

What are they paying us for?

Time is money.

Money is time.

Design is for content.

Not, I mean, we're not just like sitting in an art gallery here, like painting away.

I wish we were.

I would love to be doing like a 1920s, like Paris, like salon art group type thing.

That would be a lovely way to spend our days.

Same.

But that is not what we're doing.

Therefore, the design has to respond to the content, which means the content must, you know, be there.

Okay, Becky, but you might be starting with a proposal outline, right?

You've got the questions, you've got some content.

Is that enough to get started?

Sure.

I don't think that counts though, because like when I set up a proposal file, you know, I always do, the first thing I do is set up, you know, set up the InDesign file.

I do the, you know, the headers and footers and the parent pages and all that.

And then I'll put in the RFP questions, which is a hot tip for anyone who does proposals.

It's always good to restate the RFP questions so that the reader can know exactly what question is being answered and check things off.

So I will make a skeleton that's very bare bones, hey-o, and we'll put all the RFP questions in there to organize, you know, on the pages.

But I'm not guessing how many pages each thing is going to be.

I'm not putting in placeholders for content.

I'm just plopping in the questions so that I've got an outline.

And that, for me, is enough.

When I first came here and people were like, we do storyboards and whatever for proposals, I literally didn't know what that means because in my experience, that for me had always just been literally just starting the InDesign file and putting in the RFP questions.

I didn't realize that you guys did photo placeholders and text content maybe could look like this.

That blew my mind.

The thought of that just didn't even compute and kind of still doesn't.

It's still a challenge.

Yeah, I find it helpful to, for me, it's a confirm, do we have the space we need for everything?

And it's a little less about design at that point, making space for the content.

Now, Kyle, I don't know if you want to continue with the house metaphor we've got going on here.

No, I've already lost it.

I know, right?

But you can start fresh.

So then what's your number one reason that you want to start with design?

For me, I think as someone who is often a content writer, you run into a problem of not knowing the size or the scope or the depth of the story that you're trying to tell unless you have a container in which to put it.

And so I sometimes...

And I'm also a type of person who, while I am a quote unquote writer or content writer, I personally tend more towards aesthetics and visual design as like a preference.

Like I'd rather...

This might be...

Maybe I shouldn't say this.

I'd really have something be really pretty than be really like this awesome long paragraph that no one's gonna read.

Like when in doubt, be beautiful first.

So for me, I almost like the constraint of like, this is going to be a paragraph long.

This is going to be two paragraphs long.

This is going to be a tagline.

This is going to be a tagline followed by a supporting sentence.

For me, that's such an easy box to write within other than almost sometimes absent that you're almost designing in your head as the writer on a word document where you might go, oh, this would be a great call out box.

Oh, this would make for bullet.

This would look really cool in bullet points.

But sometimes it's better to be like it is bullet points.

So write a short bullet point, don't write a paragraph.

Becky's so, so skeptical right now.

I wish you could see her face.

This sounds like a personality thing, because so you you individually are someone who could be given, you know, a visual template and be told, this is how much room we have.

This is how we're going to lay it out.

And you'll be like, totally awesome.

You'll write to that.

It'll be a great partnership.

We'll high five and like ride into the sunset.

But I feel like a lot of the time with the work that we do, especially with proposals, you're getting six different people writing content who have no idea what's going on with the response itself.

And you can say, hey, this is what we're shooting for with the layout, but you will get 50 different variations, lengths of content.

Someone will write an entire book.

Someone will barely barf up three lines of text.

You never quite know what you're going to get.

So that's where I'm kind of like, whatever layout I do is going to be a waste.

Because I'm clearly not in control of the situation and never will be.

So, it's wishful thinking and wasteful thinking.

I think.

Well, I also feel like where we're kind of talking past each other, and we probably agree, is a proposal to me is definitely different than a website or a one-pager.

Or, you know, there's going to be different approaches to different pieces of marketing collateral.

And specifically when you're talking about a proposal, when you are talking about space and page constraints, it might not be the most effective thing to design first.

Because obviously, you're working within a certain parameter that then has to be designed around.

And I totally agree.

On this exact proposal example that I brought up earlier, we're working in Word documents, and some answers are three pages and some answers are one paragraph.

And I will concede that it's almost impossible to anticipate something like that.

So of course, like section 7314 is going to be super long, and section 7315 is going to be super short.

A designer can accommodate for that after the fact.

But then again, and not everybody's going to play the game this way, what if you did show them 7314 and said, you have this much space within the proposal to answer this question?

Probably most working in our world where we're dealing with clients and not necessarily like a cohesive internal team that all speaks the same language.

Again, I will concede you're not going to get someone to say, excellent, here's your 500 words on electrical design.

But you could, you might, don't be so pessimistic.

I quite like word counts actually.

That's kind of my one thing that I will do, cart before the horse, egg before the chicken, whatever is, if I kind of know generally how much text room at least we're going to have, I can get it through my head that I can tell somebody, hey, we need 150 words for this, 550 words for that.

And then they don't have to think about layout.

I don't have to do a bunch of work that I then have to undo and recreate.

It's just sort of, it boils it down to math, which I know they like.

So that's the language that I'm trying to speak with them.

And then I'll say, cut this down to however many words.

And that typically gets good results.

So if we could just like stick with that, I'd be in.

I think it's really telling that Kyle, as the writer, is appreciating that design is going to help him be a better writer.

And then for our clients, or if you are looking at your in-house team, you know the skills and preferences for writing.

You know, everyone, you meet people and they love to write.

They want to write the cover letter.

They demand that that stays on their plate.

And then you have a whole bunch of others who are like, anything you can do to help me, including me just talking and you interviewing me, that's what I want to do.

So, I think that is, that's a really strong case that Kyle has made there for, you know, even as the writer, having those constraints on the design side is helpful.

But Becky, you're stuck there feeling like you're going to have to redo your work.

No one has time for redoing work.

Yeah, yeah, I think, because for me, it's similar to what Kyle was saying.

To have good, effective design, it has to be responsive to the content.

So, like, if someone writes, you know, a fabulous case study, that I'm going back to proposals again, but if someone's written a fabulous case study that's totally amazing, and I just think, like, this should be, this could be a whole page with, like, you know, pictures of this and that and, like, little labels and, I mean, like, I can't think of that ahead of time without the content.

Yeah, of course.

So, like, I might, you know, spend all this time laying something out the way I think it's gonna go, and then they send me content that's wildly different.

There's probably good stuff in that content.

You never quite know.

So to take the content and then put it into a layout that really complements what we're saying, not just, you know, fits into a page the way I want it to, I think is the ideal situation.

Yeah, and it could fall back on, it's sort of dependent on the team you're working with and your sort of interpersonal knowledge of how different folks work.

If you have someone who you know is going to go stream of consciousness, fly off the handle, fill up a word document with a ton of brilliant stuff, maybe they're just a brilliant designer or a brilliant construction mind, they know all about means and methods and sequencing and phasing and all this kind of stuff, that could be an instance where obviously you shouldn't design preemptively for someone like that.

You should let them do their thing, get the content in there.

How can we break this up?

How can we use different text formatting, bullet points, call outs, quotes, pull quotes, case studies, everything that Becky just mentioned?

People like that or writers like that, they should go first.

There might also be a type of person who would respond more to this sort of paint by numbers approach, as I mentioned, where it's always super helpful to me to say, look how awesome this page is.

What if you just wrote a tagline and a supporting paragraph, and then we just need two body paragraphs, and it's just going to sing, because like we have this huge image, we have this beautiful graphic, but that is going to depend on the writer you're dealing with and sort of the working style and the understanding that person has of how design and content interplay with one another.

It's interesting, I'm noticing that you keep saying as a content writer, you keep saying like, oh, the visual is so important, the layout, we've got to show this wonderful looking product.

And I keep going on about how we're telling a story, we've got to get the message across.

I think maybe the reason we've taken the stance that we have is because we have such deep respect for the other side of...

For the other side, wow, look at us finding common ground.

Do you hear that, America?

You can learn a thing or two from me and Becky.

Well, you already dropped a nice tip on how to work with the team, or if the team wants to go in a direction that is not your preferred method, how do you make the best of that?

So Kyle, your tip there was like, understanding your team's strengths, what's gonna help them out the most and focus on that.

But do either of you have any other lessons learned or things you might recommend when you're being asked to do something before you feel like you're ready to do it?

I mean, I wish I knew.

I've had to make storyboards before proposals.

And like every time I feel like I'm trying to write poetry in a foreign language that I don't speak.

But I will say the word count thing is maybe my best tip for someone who's frustrated about having to design before you have content, because I think that is maybe the middle ground that we can both kind of understand.

It's not too much commitment on the part of the designer.

And it makes great sense to the person who's writing.

I think it maintains a lot of freedom, which I like.

I don't like to constrain people.

I mean, without getting too, you know, esoteric about it here, like I think there needs to be some level of like creative freedom on both sides.

People need to be able to write what they feel is the right thing to write.

And the designers need to do the design that they feel is right.

So when you do get that kind of collaboration that's really healthy on both sides, I think, yeah, the meeting in the middle, the compromise, that's what I'm looking for.

And so far, I think the only thing I've been able to point to is like, you know, word counts and suggestions.

What if we did this?

It would be nice to have a XYZ without necessarily saying it has to fit into this exact thing.

This is what it has to be.

Yeah, I'm sure we've all been on a project, whether it's a proposal or website or anything in between those, where we thought as the marketing team that something was going to take this amount of space.

But you get your technical experts in the room, and it can blow your mind.

Oh, it's only two sentences?

That's all you need?

Or we need seven pages to fully complete that whole process.

Maybe seven is a little bit excessive, but you know what I mean?

It can be way beyond the word count that we put out there.

So that's a great starting point.

And then that collaboration, like hearing from your team what they actually need and flexing quickly so that you can use that space, you know, always making decisions like, well now, what's the best way to use the space, given that information?

Okay, drawing back on all your experiences as a marketer, can you think of a time or two when not having what you needed felt like it, you know, bit you, got you trapped, or you know, you ended up being stuck because you were, you know, so set in your ways or your process?

I don't know, I love the war stories, so if you've got one to share, I'm sure everyone else would like to hear too.

I'll think about if there's a specific thing that comes to mind, but I do feel like, and it's funny because like Becky said, we're just too nice for this debate.

We're both just like conceding to the other side, but definitely if you're going to go design first, I think one of the biggest risks you can run into is if you fall in love with something that you've designed or something visual that's just really working for you, but the content just isn't going to fit.

It's too long, it's too short, it requires a different approach.

You have to be able to make space to say, you know, this story is actually important enough that it needs to like break the boundaries of what I've designed.

And it can be hard to, you know, kill your darling that way, if you will, to say, man, I really had this beautiful section of the website all built out, but I've got to take the L on this one and say, you know, this story that's being told deserves more space or needs less space or needs to adjust in order to tell the story more effectively.

And that's absolutely where you can run into some waste or some strain where you've already done work and you've got to then kind of trash it because you have to go back to the drawing board and respect the content in a different way.

That's probably why, for a lot of website projects, pushing the content first does help with the amount of redesign.

Yeah.

And I could just be coming at this from a very unique and or strange place in that I have been fortunate enough in my time at Middle of Six to be able to wear both hats, which I find to be very fulfilling and very interesting.

And so maybe I just have like a split personality on this where I can kind of just like see both sides way too much.

But we have collaborated with web designers on different websites and they are almost universal.

We want the content first.

And I have to say, in my experience, that gives me a little bit of like the uncomfortable feeling because it's that opening up a blank word document and just staring at a page type of a feeling where I'm just like, woof.

Like, even though you go through a robust discovery process, as I mentioned before, I still start designing it in my head because I'm just like, how long should this paragraph be about the company?

Is this a quick and punchy type of a vibe where we're just going to write three sentences?

This company was founded in XYZ and that's why they're so awesome.

And here you go, bud, moving on.

Or are we telling like, are we writing a timeline of beginning, middle and end that's going to be five paragraphs long and go from 1900 to 2024, there's still that blank page is still putting an onus on the content writer to make decisions.

And I find that challenging personally.

And on a website, we do a little bit of mocking up the page to get an idea so we're understanding what the buckets are.

I mean, how could you can't start with a white page in a word document and figure out what you're going to do for the project descriptions without thinking about what that experience is?

So, uh-oh, I see where we're going towards the end of this podcast.

We need both.

Compromise.

That's that's fair.

Yeah, I think websites specifically, I mean, you need some kind of structure to be able to.

But I think I think there's three people.

There's like a chicken and egg and like another part of this going on with the website.

Like, because what chicken is it?

What chicken part is it?

It's a pull it, you know, a bait, a young chicken.

I know.

Like, what's the third thing?

It's like there's a turkey.

There's the hatchling.

I don't know the seeds or whatever chicken.

Who hasn't like a chick, a chicklet?

What is that called?

That's gum.

That's gum.

Anyway.

Yeah.

So there's chicken.

There's egg.

There's like the young, the young chicklet.

It is gum.

So yeah.

My ideal situation with website design is you've got like, you've got the people doing the technical, like the nerd stuff, like they're coding and building the structure and whatever.

And that is design.

I mean, for sure.

But like, you've got to start there.

And then you've got the people like writing the content, like doing that sort of thing.

And then for me, like I don't even want to know, like what's going on with the website.

Like I want my role in that to be like, let me know when you need icons.

Tell me exactly how many pixels they have to be.

What do you want?

Where does it go?

And like, I don't even want to see it till it's done.

So like, I feel like I'm just like the pepperoni on a pizza.

This is too many metaphors, but like what I'm saying is like, I think you've got like the hard coders and then you've got the content writers.

And then I just want to be like pulled in every now and then to design something and throw it at you and just wake me up when it's over kind of thing.

Wake me up when it's over.

Well, I can appreciate that we're all coming from our areas of strength and comfort, but what I'm hearing is that it's all very collaborative.

And depending on if you have just a couple of days to turn something around or you're working on something for five months, like a website could be, you're going to take a different approach.

And hopefully you have the benefit of strong team members all around you to provide good design input and editing.

And it's better through that process.

So that's the real answer.

There isn't one that comes first at all, it's going to be developed together and be iterative.

Spoiler alert, we knew this was coming.

That's the summary.

But I wanted to share just a teeny anecdote from a conference I went to, I don't know, more than a decade ago, it was a long time ago, and listening to a speaker, and maybe I've even mentioned this on the podcast before, so I'm so sorry if it's a repeat.

But she just said, if you're a designer, because it was a design conference, get good at writing, you need to write your own captions, you need to write your own headlines, do not sit around waiting for the copywriters to come and give you what you need to move forward.

And I think there is, that's relevant here in this case too, if you can do both and get comfortable, even putting in placeholders, Kyle's thinking through the design, you don't have a degree in design, but you can imagine what it's gonna be.

And Becky is often writing headlines and finding ways to punch things up, even if it's just in the imaginary state, in the conceptual format that we might be putting something together.

That's strong recommendation for all marketers.

Get comfortable with both, because then you'll be free to let the design and the content evolve and not feel so trapped or that you are throwing out good work to do the next stage.

It kind of works hand in hand.

That's very true.

You can generate ideas by...

That's happened to me before.

I've been working on layouts where I didn't have all the content, but I'll think, oh, it'll be really cool or funny or attention-grabbing if we did something like this.

And then that leads to more ideas that become sort of a wonderful product.

So yeah, I guess that's true.

Choose a side, Wendy.

What do you really think?

Come on.

Well, I know I went to the middle.

That was where my side was.

The middle of six.

We're all cowards now.

We start, we were so excited for a debate.

We did.

I challenged the team.

I'm like, let's hold strong to our side.

But the thing is, is that's not the way we work.

We are very collaborative.

If I really had to pick a side, I'm going to go with, because I started out in design and I was really struggled when people asked me to make infographics, but didn't give me any of the info.

And I did not even know where to start.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, come on.

That's insane.

Even I could admit that.

And that is a common request or whatever, some variation on that, where people...

This would be a great place for an infographic.

Oh, yes.

The famous infographic.

Do we have some data?

What are we trying to say here?

You know, that's more interesting than a number in a bubble.

Right?

I think there's kind of...

I've made some fake infographics.

That was the thing when infographics first came on the scene, that was just like the number one thing to say all the time, was like, wouldn't this be a great place for an infographic?

And it's like, yeah, but about what, dude?

Do we have a story?

Can we start with the content first?

So I guess that'll be my stance, but...

Yeah, but you guys, why does Lorem Ipsum even exist if it's not for design coming first?

Shots fired.

Think about it.

Does anyone ever use the hipster Lorem Ipsum?

I love that.

I think it's hilarious.

Yeah, you can just Google it.

I've seen it, but we all, we know that Becky is the queen of bespoke Lorem Ipsum, which I don't even know how to describe in a concise enough manner, but it's like quotes from novels or books you've never heard of or...

Jerry Maguire, the living room speech gets used a lot.

That's a classic or inputting the names of famous footballers from like Liverpool FC into org charts.

It just, it's actually the best way to do placeholder content.

So I think we should all steal that.

It's my only joy in life, I swear to God.

Yeah, it's your only joy in life.

I mean, that's okay.

I'm not amped up from the debate.

Adrenaline is coursing.

Yeah, no, I love putting fun little Easter eggs in there, like, and I just, I'm always hoping that some client will, like, know who these, like, random British comedians are in the org chart or whoever, like, but it just, it's so rarely happens.

Well, it's a treat.

And yet it's almost like when you do those cheeky things, it shows the content writer in me, like, oh, look what you can accomplish if you go for, like, something humorous or if you augment the design with a catchy headline or something spicy that people don't expect.

So I don't know.

Trying to try not trying to keep the argument going.

So the secret is to have fun.

Yeah, I'd say that half of the time, at least in the projects I'm working with Becky on, if some some kind of fun, clever thing is thrown out there, obviously not the wrong people on an org chart, but more of just headlines or creative ideas.

What do you think of that?

They get picked up.

Yeah.

Like you were saying, Becky, a little bit of inspiration that comes through the design process can turn into something else really fun.

But it's to your point.

It's just if you're good at both, then, or not even necessarily good, if you are attuned or thoughtful about both, a lot of inspiration and a lot of collaboration can come from it.

Yeah.

Don't trap yourself by just waiting for the next thing.

Free your mind.

Yeah.

Exactly.

All right.

Well, on that, that wonderful words of wisdom from Kyle, we will wrap this episode up.

Thank you for attempting a debate.

We're just too darn nice for real debates, but I appreciate you sharing your experiences and thoughts, and we will see you on a future episode.

Thanks, Kyle.

Thanks, Becky.

You got it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Always a joy.

The Shortlist is presented by Middle of Six.

Our producer is Kyle Davis, with digital marketing support by the team at Middle of Six.

If you're looking for past episodes or more info, check out our podcast page at middleofsix.com/theshortlist.

You can follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram at Middle of Six.

Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode.

Until next time, keep on hustling.

The Shortlist is a podcast that explores all things AEC marketing. Hosted by Middle of Six Principal, Wendy Simmons, each episode features members of the MOS team, where we take a deep dive on a wide range of topics related to AEC marketing including: proposal development, strategy, team building, business development, branding, digital marketing, and more. You can listen to our full archive of episodes here.