We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Joyce Ho a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Joyce, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

Though I have always been interested in fine arts during my childhood, design came to me in at a very young age to create purpose through artful expressions. Graphic design, especially, carries a strong goal-oriented approach in communicating not only visually but also effectively with intention. It perhaps started back in high school when I was working with a team of designers to help design the monthly school magazine. The results felt more rewarding as we were telling stories, honoring the work written by others, and making the content accessible through print. To me at the time, graphic design benefitted from a clear form of communication that inspired curiosity and resonation while fine arts bridged connection through ambiguity and poetics. It wasn’t until my time in a design college that I see my design practice blurring that boundary of the two and it continues today in my early career as I approach each project with an artful manner. Design naturally became what I knew I would do for the rest of my life professionally.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am now a graphic designer based in Brooklyn, NY. I moved to the states four years ago to pursue my undergrad at Rhode Island School of Design. I was able to explore what design meant to me in a more rigorous way with the amazing faculty and cohort. With multiple internships at different design studios I had a growing curiosity of the editorial field. Post graduation I was lucky enough to be a digital news design fellow at the New York Times. There I coded, designed, and most importantly learned how to speak and design when collaborating and designing for non designers. It was a crucial experience to help me utilize editorial skills to where I work now with a lovely bunch at the Brooklyn design studio Order where we mainly focus on branding. Branding is where I get to utilize everything in my toolkit to build a more timeless design, whether it goes from traditional type layout, motion, 3D, or coding experiences. More than anything, it’s a great place to help me communicate and design for a variety of clients and businesses.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

There’s one thing that seems hard to ignore—AI. It’s the hot topic, but more so an urgent one that’s threatening the creative field. If anyone starts reading into the creative industry headlines, junior designer roles are getting replaced, people are getting laid off, illustrators are losing jobs from AI generated images. While I’m open to exploring new tools and trying out technology that helps facilitate the design process, mainstream use of AI has yet been able to set up a satisfactory working model thinking why and how we are using AI in design and media. While there are much larger controversies, relying AI on creative output creates a disappointing scene without knowing how models are trained as well as its impact on exploiting design process, research and human collaboration to pure aesthetics and appropriated image-making. To help creatives thrive, businesses should understand why and if appropriate to incorporate AI into their design process.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Developing confidence is a big thing! A big part of my design education and career I had to combat imposter syndrome until understanding it was growing from insecurity instead of humility. That lack of confidence can easily eat me up overthinking my simple decisions as well as how I was with others. It wasn’t until much later in college that I regained confidence doing the work I was most passionate about. I was able to understand that I didn’t have to be the best designer in the world in order to feel confident about my work. I kept looking up to others and seeing those skills and traits as something I could learn from other than something that stemmed insecurity. It sure is a good feeling to not have imposter syndrome stopping me from a lot of decisions I made for my career and life!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://joyceho.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joyceho.x/