Starting This Journal: Reflections from a Developing Practice

I’m Elia Vara, and I work in digital marketing and strategy. In my role at Smith & Brenson, I’ve been involved in brand and digital development across the company, and more recently I’ve taken on a lead role shaping the Circle Electrical brand project.

Alongside this, I’m formalising my skills through a Postgraduate Diploma in Digital Marketing with Purdue University, and I’ve been looking for a way to bring everything together: the practical work I’m doing, the frameworks I’m learning, the ideas I’m testing, and the patterns I’m starting to see across projects.

This journal is where I’m doing that.

It’s a working space — a place to think in public, track the development of my practice, and document the ideas, tools and decisions that shape the work. I’ll be writing about content strategy, campaigns, messaging, SEO, and the mechanics of building and managing a brand project from the inside.

This isn’t a polished set of case studies (that will come later), and it’s not a beginner’s blog. It’s a record of real work in progress: the questions I’m working through, the methods I’m trying, and the strategic decisions that carry projects forward.

You can expect posts on:

• insights from ongoing projects

• experiments in content and digital strategy

• tools and frameworks that prove useful

• notes from my course and how I apply them

• the early stages of building structure for a new brand

  
  

The aim is simple: to create clarity through writing, and to build a long-term record of how my practice evolves.

Thanks for reading — and welcome to the journal.

— Elia