Image courtesy of Amy Holloway
By Peturla Scarlett
The first thing Amy Holloway does when she begins work is look through her email to check if there’s anything new pending and follow up with contacts her team is currently working with.
Holloway is a communications and marketing manager at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg who has had years of experience doing various jobs in her field.
“I did a fellowship at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Health Communication for a year, which was really fun, but it helped me to see that I didn’t want to work for a large government organization,” she said.
After that, Holloway gained an additional 10 years of experience working for Community Action Stops Abuse (CASA), a local organization with a mission of “challenging the societal acceptance of all forms of domestic violence.” There, she worked as a volunteer coordinator and eventually moved up to executive director’s assistant. Later, she started working for USF St. Petersburg in Academic Affairs before finally getting to her current position as a communications and marketing manager.
One of Holloway’s many tasks involve reviewing the team’s project board to see what everyone is currently working on and figuring out what projects need to begin soon based on priority and specific deadlines. Holloway is also responsible for paying invoices and working directly with the graphic design team to see what they need in order to successfully complete their individual tasks.
“I think of the partners that we work with on campus as kind of our customers and I want them to always have a good feeling about our team, I want them to feel good about working with our team and feel like they’re getting what they need from us…that relationship building and just making sure that people’s needs are getting met [is important] because then that just makes everything easier going forward,” she said.
Having a good relationship with campus partners isn’t the only thing that’s important in this department.
For Holloway, one of the best things about her job is her fellow coworkers, “I think any job I’ve ever worked in where I’ve felt happy, it’s because [of] the team that I work with … right now, we have a really good team, we all really work well together,” she said.
Lily Hoddinott, publication designer of the communications and marketing department agrees, “We communicate very well and being here in this position specifically has been probably the best in my career,” she said.
Since the Innovations Magazine that Hoddinott designs for USF St. Petersburg is only published once per year, she also works closely with the graphic design specialist to complete other projects as well.
When it comes to generating ideas for projects she’s working on Hoddinott said, “being a creative, it’s kind of strange because there are just points in your day that inspiration will hit … if I’m watching TV, and I see a really cool graphic that I like, I’ll pause the TV and I’ll take a picture. I have a folder on my computer of just screenshots of things that I like.”
According to Hoddinott, it’s important for graphic designers to have a balance between skill and logic, “It’s not like it’s all creative … you need some of that other side, that logical portion to be able to say, ‘Okay, this is how I’m going to capture this person’s attention,’” she said.
Alex Jonas, a graphic design specialist that works with both Holloway and Hoddinott said that aspiring designers need to be aware of the trends, “The software’s constantly evolving and developing, they update it usually every year so that’s one hurdle to overcome … adapting to the trends in the world [is another]; one thing that is popular now was not popular six months ago as far as design wise and six months from now it [might] be not popular again.”
Jonas likes that his job can sometimes have a direct effect on people and the decisions they choose to make, all because they encountered something he designed. One of the things he’s proud of in his career is “the connection of what we do to help the university overall. We want students to have a good experience and we want prospective students to consider coming to USF so we try to showcase the greatness of what this campus has to offer.”
A combination of passion and dedication from this team is a part of the reason Holloway enjoys her position as a communications and marketing manager.
“There’s sort of a responsibility that we all know we have to each other [because] the work that we have going out reflects on all of us so I feel like everyone takes it seriously,” she said.
And if members of the team make mistakes, rather than panic or get upset Holloway said, “We just kind of work together to do whatever we need to do to fix them.”
