Elizabeth Maki

Brand & Content Lead

A brand is a promise and content is the proof - the specific, true thing that makes people trust you. I do both because they belong together.

I own every brand decision across the company and run all non-product design, partnering directly with our CEO to align brand strategy with business outcomes. That work is staffed by a junior designer, two ongoing contractors, and project-based freelancers I direct and coach.
I lead our content strategy, the content roadmap and our pillars. I’m the voice and quality bar every piece has to clear. Ideas come from across our team, and I'm the throughline that makes them cohere.

Brand

Company rebrand

I turned inquirED from a scrappy academic startup into a brand that could scale and still feel like the best coach you ever had.

A board member asked which agency we'd used. We hadn't, I did it in-house.

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Website redesign

I redesigned inquirED's site so it stopped reading as free curriculum and got better at converting buyers.

New sessions up 165% year over year, and form submissions up 30%.

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Product branding

A product identity that stands on its own in a crowded market but still feels like a part of the brand family.

Built to hold across mixed ownership, one product homegrown, one under exclusive license, and still read as one family.

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Content

Essay

Your team isn't bad at AI. They're grieving.

"I've got a great idea," I told my manager. "I'm going to build our design system, turn it into a plugin, push it to our org repo, and train everyone to run it themselves." I paused. "I guess then I won't have a job."

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Essay

Brand voice is language + cognition.

A voice isn't a list of words you permit or ban. It's a way of thinking and words are the tip of the iceberg.

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Writing sample

The same brand written into a campaign, a product page, a series launch, and a research piece.

See how I build content and write across channels and audiences.

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More brand work

Basejoy

Brand identity for a B2B SaaS tool that makes database monitoring feel approachable, not another dark-mode dashboard.

Meadow Bloom

Brand identity for a Seattle landscape designer, somewhere between wild and cultivated.

Edwell

Brand identity for a K-12 teacher apprenticeship program, credible to district leaders and warm to candidates.

Great First Eight

Logo refresh that strips a busy mark back to one color palette and lets the illustration do the work.