Communications · Writing · Strategy
I make complicated things make sense.
I am Brian Mills, a communications professional with seven years in marketing, communications, and content strategy. I am currently a Product Marketing Specialist at JEOL USA, where I explain electron microscopes to audiences that range from the general public to the specialists who run them daily.
subscribers receive JEOLink, the technical newsletter I write and hand-build in HTML every two months.
Read case study 01subscribers in an inherited, unused email campaign I researched, split into three segments, and used in full.
Read case study 02running a marketing function I founded from nothing, as a department of one, including 50+ process guides still in company-wide use.
Read case study 03The demonstration Written for this portfolio
One microscope, four readers.
The same scanning electron microscope, explained four times. The facts never change. The words do. Switch the reader and watch the writing refocus, the way an operator turns up the magnification.
A scanning electron microscope takes pictures of things far too small for any ordinary microscope to see. Ordinary microscopes use light, and light has a built-in limit: below a certain size, details blur together no matter how good the lenses are. Electrons do not have that limit. A microscope that uses them can show details thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair.
A scanning electron microscope, or SEM, forms images with electrons instead of light. The reason is resolution. An optical microscope cannot resolve features much smaller than roughly 200 nanometers, because visible light's wavelength gets in the way. An electron beam behaves as a wave too, but with a far shorter wavelength, so an SEM resolves features down to the nanometer scale.
An SEM covers magnifications from about 10x to well past 100,000x with a depth of field no optical instrument approaches, which is why fracture surfaces, powders, and rough samples read so clearly. Secondary electron yield rises where the surface tilts toward the detector, so edges and ridges render bright and the image reads directly as topography.
A field-emission source gives the probe its brightness and stability; the condensers set probe current, the objective sets the final spot, and the scan coils raster it over the field of view. Standard SE collection is the Everhart-Thornley arrangement, with the SE1 and SE2 components carrying the topographic signal at short working distance.
The plates Three case studies
Rebuilding a technical newsletter
JEOLink reaches 17,000+ subscribers every two months and covers nine product lines in one email. Written, organized, and hand-built in HTML so each reader finds their section first.
02The inherited campaign
A predecessor left a paid 13,478-subscriber email campaign unused. Researched, split into three segments, one email written for each, the commitment used in full.
03Zero to a marketing function
No marketing department existed in December 2019. Built from nothing and run as a department of one for roughly four years, including 50+ process guides still in company-wide use.
The method Receiver-first writing
A message that does not land did not happen.
Most communication work optimizes the sender: the message, the channel, the schedule. I design for the receiver, what the reader already knows, what they need, and what they will understand on first read. The full method is under Writing.
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