Welcome to BuiltOnAir, a podcast and video series about all things Airtable. Each episode, we talk with someone active in the Airtable community to discuss their experiences and showcase an interesting way they’ve used Airtable in their work.

Say hello to Ash Forrest, a freelance artist and from St. Louis, MO on BuiltOnAir this week. Ash is a photographer, artist and marketer who has brought together each world into a great blend of creativity and function. She’s a livestreamer and community builder that has adopted Airtable into many personal and professional uses, and shares some of her best creations here. 

A few years back, Ash started using a service called Twitch to livestream (video streamed real-time online) herself doing art for a live, virtual audience. Building a Twitch channel involves doing a lot of work to build a community, so she has spent a lot of time streaming physical art, digital art, and more. There are multiple interactive elements built into the system that involves interaction between streamer and audience. She’s done a 24 hour livestream to raise money for charity before.

She has extensive experience with marketing (especially from her time as a photographer), and it was through a client 2 years ago that she discovered Airtable. She was immediately attracted to the simplicity and visual appeal of organizing her data. She’s always sharing the app with fellow artists as a great option for staying on track without needing to code or even write formulas. 

Now Ash uses it for meal planning, budgeting, as a bullet journal, bill paying, business accounting, and a place to track physical records. In her own words, “anything that [she] can fit into an Airtable, [she’ll] make it fit into an Airtable.” This also includes keeping a rolodex of clients, content creation, and a library of artwork created (on sale, purchased, in development, etc). “Everything in [her] life can be Airtabled.”

The first Airtable base Ash shares is a bullet journal (a journal tracking the different aspects of personal life and habits). It makes great use of an emoji header for each field to represent the various habits she wants to check on each day, including water intake, vitamins, exercise and more. She’s also added a place to capture any ideas she has during the day in a single place, then use a view to see them all in one place. The journal helps her see correlations between variables e.g. how the food she eats affects her energy level, and more. 

The second base she showcases is a content and marketing system she built to help blogs. With the base she’s able to create a library of content with all assets contained on site. She built in a SEO checklist to help bloggers make sure each aspect of their content is optimization, with checkboxes to ensure the focus keywords are included in each relevant element. Ash included a social media table as a separate place to associate each social platform’s posts with the blog article in the first table. 

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