Influential Woman · Design and Marketing

Telitha Snell

Administrative Assistant II, West Virginia State University

Charleston, WV

Certifications · Degrees · Memberships

Degree Journalism and Mass Communications degree Member NAACP

Her Story

About Telitha

I've been in the design and marketing field for about 20 years. I majored in journalism and mass communications, and in my last semester of college, I took a magazine layout class where I fell in love with graphic design. I started out as a graphic artist at a newspaper company for almost a year, but when they shut down and laid everybody off, I decided it was time to start my own business doing freelance graphic design. Over time, I expanded my services to include promotional marketing and consultation, using what I learned in school. My typical day involves responding to clients, producing estimates, providing proofs for them to review for print, and verifying information. I would say my main area of expertise today is branding and marketing. While I run my own business, I also work a full-time job during the day for stable income until I can fully invest in my business alone. What I'm most proud of is being able to manage everything all at once, maintaining a business presence while working full-time and raising three children as a single parent.

Her Interview

Ten minutes with Telitha

01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?

I would say to get a niche for what you want to do, and not try to do everything. I started out trying to offer every service in the book, and I realized that the work that I wanted to do the most, I wasn't getting a lot of. I feel like it's important to focus on at least a short list of duties or services that you want to offer in the beginning. Focus on the things you want to do the most so you're pulling in the people that you want and the types of jobs that you want the most. Then the other things that you're capable of offering, once you get a client base, you can start to advertise those services within that client base. That way, you're still being able to offer that, but you're focused on the things you want to do the most, and those other things will come.

02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?

AI has been a major challenge in my industry. A lot of the clients that I used to have don't use me anymore. For example, they used to get me to build flyers for their events, but now they just use AI, and you can usually tell that the flyers are created through AI. If they can do it for free, I mean, I can't be mad at them. There are some clients who will still come to me for things because they want that human touch, they want things tailored a certain way that AI just may not be able to do. What I do is use AI to my advantage, though, because some things are easier to find with AI than it is to actually edit and Photoshop various things. But for certain things, a human is just better. In this situation, you have to sell yourself more. You might have to rebrand, even.

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