I worked for the Lincoln, Nebraska-based cybersecurity company, Infogressive, from August 2017 until its acquisition by M/C Partners-backed “Ascend Technologies LLC” in late July 2020. As a result of the merger, I transitioned to Ascend in my existing role, which was made official starting August 2020.

During my three years at Infogressive, I held two major roles. First, throughout the duration of my first year with the company, I was the Graphic Design Intern. During that time, I worked an average of 15-30 hours per week around my class schedule at Nebraska Wesleyan and alongside my part-time job at Petsmart. Then, I slowly transitioned in my role and responsibilities while remaining employed for a similar number of hours during my senior year — at that time, holding the title of Content Marketing Specialist. Post-graduation, my title and job role were formalized when I transitioned into a salaried employee position and continued my work full-time.

the infogressive brand

The Infogressive brand consisted of a dynamic pairing of blues, accented by the bright cherry-red of the logo icon. The “swish” or I-shaped icon of the logo is the one element of the Infogressive brand that was already in place. Prior to the company rebrand in 2017, Infogressive assets used various combinations of red, grey, and black elements and assorted fonts.

The Marketing Director in 2017, Crystal Ridder, suggested a transition to blue-hues, citing beliefs that the red was not only overused for technology companies, but that it also felt aggressive as the only color in the branding. After deciding on the final color codes for the blue color scheme, the existing Infogressive-Red was included as an accent color. New font pairings and design elements were also incorporated into the rebrand. View the full 2020 Infogressive Brand Guide here.

After the new Infogressive brand was fully established, I was unofficially appointed the “brand manager” — ensuring sales team members’ presentations and other creations followed the new guidelines, and even providing resources and guidance for partner companies with co-branding agreements for reselling our services.

Infogressive Designs

With the new brand in place, several projects followed. Infogressive required entirely new signage, booth displays for tradeshows and events, a suite of cohesive datasheets to better represent services, apparel, giveaway materials, and more. 

Infogressive content

Through my work on the Infogressive datasheets, my role as the graphic design intern transitioned into a more general marketing role and began to include more opportunities to write content for marketing materials, the website, video scripts, and more. At the point of the Infogressive-Ascend merger, my role was approximately 65% content writing, 20% graphic design, and 15% miscellaneous marketing “backend” tasks. Here’s a small selection of the types of content I wrote regularly for inbound marketing and/or marketing campaigns:

Datasheets

Taglines, statistics, service descriptions — and the design, of course. For datasheets, I generally made a first draft based on my own research about the service, choosing key features, highlighting benefits, and explaining processes. Then, my work would be reviewed and tweaked by engineers, the CEO, and/or my supervisor in marketing before finalizing.

pillar pages

In the Inbound Marketing framework, a pillar page is a cohesive piece of long-form content that lives on your website and covers a topic in-depth, including sub-topics that branch out from the overall keyword. This type of “blog” or “ultimate guide” style of page will then link out to other clusters of content on your blog or website to encourage visitor engagement and demonstrate the connections between the topic and subtopics. The long-form content is often offered for PDF download to give visitors the option to “read later”.  I completed both the writing and ebook design for these pieces.

ebooks

I wrote and designed classic business ebooks as well, covering commonly-searched terms and topics to gain inbound leads. Some of my favorites included Cybersecurity Basics and 9 Easy Steps to Better Cybersecurity. Here’s one of those ebooks, published in August 2018.

case studies

Producing real case study content for Infogressive’s marketing was a big future goal during my first year with the company that became a reality as we matured as an organization. I was able to complete three Infogressive case studies prior to the merger and had around 3-5 additional case studies in progress that were not able to be released as Infogressive content. Here’s one example:

blog articles

Nearly every article on the Infogressive blog dated 2018 – 2020 was either written by me and edited by a cybersecurity engineer or vice versa — written by a cybersecurity engineer and edited by me. Writing blogs for campaigns was one of my favorite tasks at Infogressive.