Jessica (Hoh) Stoddard

I was inspired to get into design because I have always loved making things. I grew up with my grandmother and my mother making things, just little crafts in the kitchen, and finding I could turn that into a professional career has really been transformational for me. In the past 8 years, I've gotten more into multimedia, especially video editing, which is still a bit more of a male-dominated field. What separates me from a lot of other people in this field, man or woman, is I can do all of the old school print things - I came up in a print house at Great American Insurance in Cincinnati. I can do packaging, any sort of print layout you need, and I also do motion graphics, social media, strategy, content, and everything you can think of in between like websites and app screens. I've got a pretty diverse background and it's exciting - it's a new challenge every day. We are challenged by AI, but I'm actually looking to leverage that pretty often. I see it more as a force multiplier than necessarily a competitor. AI may be able to help me create content faster, but a lot of my job is making sure what they want is correct, and what AI can't do is revise its work with new ideas all day. Those revisions are core to a designer's strengths, and I do those really well.