LESA PETERSEN 
 COMMUNICATIONS + 
 WRITING + EDITING + 
 DESIGN + CREATIVE 

Hi!

Let's work together.

 

Where I am

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I am a Michigan-based, 100%-remote freelance communications expert, copywriter, senior editor, and graphic designer with 20+ years of success in creating projects that move audiences and exceed clients' needs. I write, edit, design, and art-direct social media campaigns, company brands, digital content, videos, public relations and event promotions, advertisements, magazines, brochures, postcards, and everything that carries a message or tells a story.

 

Through professional roles as a communications freelancer, a content specialist for Indiana University's internal advertising agency, a communications manager for three university schools and colleges, and a senior writer-editor for educational publishers and businesses, I've created thousands of recruitment, development, branding, sales, instructional, and technical communications—websites, impact reports, campaigns, videos, textbooks, magazines, research reports and journals, brochures, digital and print ads, proposals, stories and features, executive messages, postcards, mailers, posters, emails, news and press, event promotions and programs, and social media (and there's more!).

 

My work has earned many recognitions—a People's Voice Webby nomination for the Best University Mobile Site (2015), a Council for Advancement of Education (CASE) Circle of Excellence National Gold Award (2009) for Indiana University's "Innovate Indiana" statewide economic development campaign—and several additional CASE awards, Educational Advertising awards, and website W3 awards. I've been fortunate to work for a wide variety of clients that range from small philanthropic organizations to Fortune 500 companies such as CVS, Liberty Mutual, Compaq, and Oracle. 

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How I got here

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When I was growing up, I liked making art, watching movies, singing, reading novels, and writing short plays with roles for all my elementary school friends. And I also liked solving Dell logic puzzles and geometry proofs, gathering tree and lake specimens to analyze under my microscope, and pretty much anything that involved math and puzzle solving. Every (completely scientific) left brain–right brain quiz I've taken online gives me the same result: I am 50%–50%!

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I've been equal parts creative and logical in my career as a communicator, and I still am as passionate about writing a creative campaign as I am about editing a full-spread table that compares benefits programs. I am fascinated by the relationship between text and design and how they work together to convey a message. This fascination is rooted in the M.A. in English Linguistics program at Purdue University, where I studied messaging in very pure linguistic forms: advertising signage and regulatory signage.

 

Communications strategy, taglines and hooks, content quality control, editorial style and brand management, video scripts and concepts, website content management and HTML editing, postcard and brochure design, long-form humanities and research stories, branding content—I love it all.

 

Let's talk about how we can work together!

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