Lena Milcarek

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Hello, World and THANK YOU!

For my first blog post I wanted to thank some people who helped me build a place to post and showcase my work. Building this website was an enormous learning opportunity for me and would not have happened without an awesome team.  I am lucky enough to know some extremely talented people who do design, ux, content, marketing, and business planning.

Tami Churns | Creative Director & UX Pro

Tami is a former creative director at Twin Collective and current UX designer at Paperless Post. I caught time with Tami as she was transitioning from a design-focused role to user experience. She designed the initial concept for the website based on a wire-frame we drew together on my kitchen table and a Pinterest inspiration board I put together for ~vibes~. I am so grateful to have her distinct design perspective on the look and feel of this site.

 

Josh & Justin Gilman | Made for Masses

I have known the Made For Masses founders for many years and was so excited to work on a creative project with them. They took the concept put together by Tami and built out the entire website including sub pages, blog, and conversion pages. Made For Masses is a studio focused on building beautiful Squarespace websites. While Squarespace is very customizable, there is no way I could have found a template to fully meet my specific needs. Having M4M take the website build to completion allowed me to focus on content creation and I am ecstatic with the results.  (Full disclosure: Josh is my boyfriend)

Krista Heflin | Content Editor

I wanted to make sure the core content of my website is clear and true to my voice - something I needed an outside expert opinion on.  Editing used to be an afterthought, but as I begin to create more content I want to be more mindful of professional content standards. Throughout the build Krista was always happy to bounce ideas and to distill down my content to succinct thoughts. 

It is probably safe to assume that going forward there will be some errors in the blog content. I have found from Krista's editing I really overuse "-" and I am pretty loose and fast with my use of the oxford comma. 

Brandon Andersen | Ceralytics

Since working with Brandon at Cision he has gone on to build his own content intelligence platform. I don't want to speak for their product but the audience insights they can pull from AI content groupings is really valuable. I have had multiple bosses and clients request reports on content return on investment...It is doable but without software it is a very manual and clunky process. Ceralytics has found a way to automate and scale content insights tied to ROI.

Beyond his software company, Brandon has always been a trusted mentor of mine (an Obi-Wan of sorts). Because he came from B2B software to become an entrepreneur he has specific, sincere, and expert perspective on my career and I am so thankful for his guidance through the years.