BlockBeat
A data-driven email, designed and built end to end
I oversaw all product and technology at The Standard, including the internal publishing tools the newsroom used every day. The project that best captures that design-meets-engineering work was BlockBeat: a programmatically generated, data-driven email.
Context
A recurring, automated product is easy to let go generic. BlockBeat had to stay considered and on-brand in every send — which meant owning not just the design but the pipeline and data behind it.
Approach
I owned BlockBeat end to end — the brand and newsletter design, the production pipeline, the engineering, and the data scraping that fed it — so the automation never came at the cost of craft.
It sat alongside the broader publishing toolset I designed and built — the internal systems that let editors move fast without fighting their software.
Outcome
A recurring, automated product that still felt designed in every issue — and gave the newsroom real leverage.