I am a content designer at Spotify, where I lead content design for podcast products. Most of my work comes down to what things are called, who decides, and what happens when the words stop being true.
I came to this by way of landscape design. For years I ran a small firm that built edible gardens, and alongside it I wrote books about growing food and spent a few years as a garden columnist for the Seattle Times. Writing for people who wanted to grow vegetables and had no patience for jargon turned out to be good preparation for writing error states.
At Meta I owned content for advertiser payments. At Spotify I have worked on an identity migration, content safety checks, analytics terminology, and the governance that keeps squads from shipping contradictory messages to the same person. A growing share of it is AI: writing the system prompts behind creator-facing features, and building tools that let product designers draft their own first pass.
I also enjoy timpani, card games, hot sauce, theoretical physics, small boats, box jumps, and paleontology.
Experience
Spotify, Senior Content Designer
2021 to present
Lead content designer across Spotify’s four podcast products, from the consumer app to creator and rights-management tools. Selected work:
- Account migration. Led content design for an identity migration that moved creators off a legacy podcast platform and onto Spotify accounts, including the recovery paths for people whose accounts did not transfer.
- Content checks. Wrote the content for experiences introducing 18+, explicit, and promotional content checks in podcast creation flows, in close collaboration with legal and policy partners.
- Messaging framework. Built the governance framework that sets precedence when multiple squads try to surface an in-product message at the same time. Now the required standard within Spotify for Creators.
- Unified analytics. Led content and terminology strategy for a unified analytics launch across Spotify for Creators and Megaphone, resolving conflicting metric names and definitions.
- Content Design Handbook. Wrote the voice, tone, naming decision tree, and styling standards used across the podcast organization.
- AI. Wrote the system prompts behind creator-facing AI features and turned the results into the team’s prompt guidelines. Built an internal tool that lets product designers self-serve first-draft copy.
Meta, Content Designer
2019 to 2021
Lead content designer for advertiser payments, the company’s primary revenue stream.
- Owned information architecture, labeling, and content for the advertiser payments interface.
- Led a cross-org effort to develop content standards for payment products, adopted company-wide.
- Defined and documented payments terminology.
- Designed and ran content experiments on payment failure flows. The winning variant in one email experiment increased reactivation of ad accounts by 18%.
Colin McCrate Web Design, Founder
2016 to 2019
Website design, development, and content for small businesses and nonprofits. Delivered client sites end to end, from research through launch.
The Seattle Times, Garden Columnist
2018 to 2021
Wrote a regular gardening column for Pacific NW Magazine.
Storey Publishing and Mountaineers Books, Author
2012 to 2020
Author of books on food gardening: Food Grown Right (2012), Grow More Food (2022).
Seattle Urban Farm Company, Owner and Lead Designer
2007 to 2017
Founded and ran a company designing edible gardens, with design lead responsibility across several hundred landscape projects.
Education
- Denison University, Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies and Biology
- Seattle Central College, Certificate of Web Design