Emerging LA is a newsletter read by 14,000+ people in LA tech, with events and a VC fellowship around it. I was in the fellowship, and I redesigned and built their site. It is handed off to their team and not live on their domain yet. Its main job is getting people subscribed, so the signup sits in the hero, and events, the newsletter archive, the fellowship and fundraising each get a page.

Upcoming events come from their Luma calendar and recent issues from beehiiv, pulled in on every build, so a new meetup never means editing the site. If a feed is down, the section shows a curated fallback list instead of an empty block. Almost all of the copy lives in one content file.

For founders raising a round, I added /fundraising: overview, investor access, visibility, syndicate and a request form, with a side rail that tracks where you are on the page. It opens on a picker of six kinds of help, from warm intros to an SPV, and ends in one form that needs no server.

When their new brand arrived in May, I put the whole site on it in a day: navy, red and orange, Fraunces, DM Sans and Space Mono, and about 80 hard-coded colors swapped for tokens. The WebGL backgrounds stop drawing off screen and drop to a still frame on reduced motion and low-end devices.