What’s my deal
Dan Ludwig is a writer, designer, and content strategist from the city of Philadelphia. He’s been described as “a master wordsmith” and “a great guy” by coworkers. He’s been described as “not as funny as he thinks he is” by his wife.
Dan is the Assistant Vice President of Digital Content Strategy at Barclays US, managing anything and everything related to content when it comes to the user experience. He’s a swiss army knife, helping with marketing work, improving internal processes, planning designs, and a hundred other little things.
He graduated from Temple University in 2013 with a Bachelor’s degree in English, widely considered a pretty bad year to do that. He survived however, eventually clawing his way to a position as a Resume Writer at a career services company. He went on to become Managing Editor, overseeing the whole team.
Eventually he left the resume game, becoming a copywriter. He started small, doing “meat and potatoes” copywriting for HVAC companies, contractors, dentists, and other small businesses. it was a great way to cut his teeth. From there, he developed a specialty in interior design an architecture, getting a position as a Copywriter at Dreamline Shower Doors.
Eventually, he became Senior Copywriter at Airgas, handling social media, advertising collateral, email marketing, product descriptions, and SEO content. he learned a lot about how to run the copywriting process itself, from ideation to reviews by legal.
During Covid-19 lockdown, he returned to resume writing and founded Jobhunters Career Services, building the LLC from the ground up with his former coworkers. They managed to help a great many people find work during and after lockdown. They closed the company down once he joined Barclays, but he will still receive cold calls from SaaS vendors until the day he dies.
He likes to draw, write for fun, box, cook, skateboard (still learning), and play video games. He has a pretty successful podcast, but don’t ask him the name of it, he won’t tell you.
Preemptively answered interview questions
Let’s get some of these out of the way.
What’s your greatest strength?
I’m a really good writer. 10 cumulative years of writing resumes teaches you a lot about word economy, efficient messaging, and the way people subconsciously perceive things they read. I understand the rhythm of a sentence and how words feel. It helps with a lot of other stuff, like big picture strategy and even design work.
What’s your greatest weakness?
I’m an anxious person. I get stressed out, things get under my skin. I try to make it work for me as much as I can; it drives me to be proactive, not paralyzed.
What’s a project you’re really proud of?
Before I joined Barclays, I designed a website for a small company technology called NVelope. You can find the full writeup here (LINK). I got to put every talent I have into practice and rebuild the whole thing with total control. I practiced something I call “copy-first design”, where the website is written first and drives the layout and structure of everything.