We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jessica Grande. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jessica below.

Jessica, appreciate you joining us today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

I am a digital content creator and marketer born and raised in Nashville, TN. I love challenging myself to learn and create in different mediums across the digital landscape. In recent years, that has been podcasting. I also love video content creation, graphic design for social media, print, and motion graphics, as well as blogging and copywriting.

I’ve been making digital content and publishing it online since I was 9 years old. It began with writing in forums online around my favorite show. Growing up in the early 2000s, I quite literally grew up as the internet was also growing. Looking back, it was such a unique time to learn about the internet because it was just as new as the ideas I had to create. All we had was writing in chatrooms for the first few years, but that’s all we needed. I learned online etiquette and what it meant to create community virtually through popular threads and forums I administrated.

From there I would go on to getting my first camera, a red Samsung digital with a video feature. I would create videos about anything and everything, teaching myself how to edit via my family’s computer in Windows Movie Maker. That’s when I discovered the new and upcoming website, YouTube, a place to upload and share my videos with the world. I was hooked on video content creation throughout high school that I began vlogging and continued to learn new ways to present ideas via the digital content I was consuming from other creators on the platform.

I didn’t know it at the time, but all of these experiences I had expressing myself creatively through digital mediums would help to build the skills that would become essential to my current profession as a professional digital content creator and marketer.

The most important skill I learned during those formative years online was how teach myself in an environment that was constantly evolving. There was something new to learn every day, and with the way technology continues to advance, it hasn’t slowed down since I posted my first thread in an online forum.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I studied new media communications (now known as interactive media) at Middle Tennessee State University, with a double minor in marketing and public relations. After graduating I landed a role with a local, family owned advertising and marketing agency as their digital marketing director. I learned so much in this role in a marketing agency. I still consider the people I worked with as mentors and am so thankful to them for investing in me right out of college as I started my career.

I provide digital content solutions for my clients, including but not limited to: graphic design for social media, print, and merchandise, strategic planning for digital media plans, podcast production, campaign strategy, content shoot coordination, as well as logo and brand design,

I believe in building communities, both on and off-line, through digital content of all kinds. At the end of the day, marketing is creating messaging that (hopefully) resonates with other humans. I bring this people-first approach to every project I work on and enjoy collaborating with like-minded creatives.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

In the age of social media, chat GPT, and algorithms, it’s so easy to base your worth and the worth of your creativity on how many arbitrary likes a post garners, or how well a post did based on some expectation of “high engagement”.

For me, sharing my creativity online has never been a numbers game. I don’t really care to have the largest following on Instagram, and I don’t intend to go “viral” with my content. The things I create, I create for myself first and foremost. But if just one other person sees it and is impacted by something I created or helped create, that’s good enough for me. I’d rather have a “small”, engaged community online than a large, unengaged audience. That’s always been a driving factor for my own personal creative journey.

My goal for my personal creative journey is to always be learning. Always be curious, and always ask, “I wonder if I can create this?” and see where that question takes me. To stay curious and keep creating, that’s my goal.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

The Non-Designers Design Book by Robin Williams (no, not that Robin Williams) – This is a great resource for understanding core design principles. Anyone with a Canva.com pro subscription should read this book.

The Associated Press Stylebook (any current edition). – This should be every writer’s writing bible, in my opinion. From punctuation to understanding which instances to use “who’s”, “whose” and “whom”, it’s a goldmine of writing knowledge. They have an app, too!

The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron (and the accompanying books The Morning Pages and The Artist’s Way Every Day) – These are just really great at helping writers get over themselves and just write for writing’s sake. Highly recommend working through The Artist’s Way Every Day at the beginning of the year for a sort of “creative devotional” time in the mornings.

Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon – It feels basic, but this book has given power and permission to so many artists and I love the design of the book.

The Artisan Soul is one of my favorite books on creativity. It is written from a religious standpoint, but even if you’re not attune to Christian philosophy, it’s a great read for understanding your own creative journey.

And just for fun, I thrifted a book called “The Anti-social network journal” published by Who’s There Inc. I love novelty journals like this and it’s got a lot of fun prompts in it to break up the digital strain on a creative who publishes online.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://jessicagrande.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itsjessgrande/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itsjessgrande/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/itsjessgrande
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl4RZQdUzjZFfodrWKTmA7Q

Image Credits

Images by @lemonydrew and @lzzrynn