Well it has been a dream of mine to run my own agency and travel the world and so here we are. From a young age I have always loved arts and crafts and when I entered High School I decided I wanted to do something creative for a career. Little did I know that design would be where I ended up. I played around with fashion design for a while, but soon realized my hatred for math and numbers was not going to work out if I was going to sew anything other than pillows. Reading through a seventeen magazine one day I came across an article talking about how you could have a job as a graphic designer and it checked all my boxes. I could make things, be creative, and make money... score. From that moment on I began taking tons of art and design classes so that I could get into a great college for graphic design and I did =]
I started my design journey in the Visual Communications program at the University of Delaware. To this day I am still uncertain exactly what visual communications means, but boy did I learn a lot. We took classes in everything from type, form, sculpture, book arts, letterpress, print making, design, advertising, illustration, drawing, digital media you name it and we took it. It was so eye opening to all the possibilities I could go into that it was exciting and overwhelming all at the same time. While there I fell in love with letterpress and printmaking and took an internship at a letterpress studio in Nashville called Sawtooth Print Shop for my winter semester. Being able to set type with your hands, ink the press, and run the paper through was the best feeling and I loved every minute of it. However, I wanted to be able to travel and carrying around a huge printing press isn't exactly ideal.
So after graduating I decided to go to Australia for a year. Here I worked at a small industrial design firm designing packaging, which was another love of mine. I also took some time to purchase a car and live out of it while driving all over Australia. Man I did not want to come back from there, but my visa did expire and I decided to go see New Zealand for a bit.
After finally coming back to states I spent the next 3 years freelancing in Florida. I worked and learned soooo much from working at an amazing advertising agency called 22 squared. The agency culture and environment was crazy, fast paced and fun and I loved all the people there. I got a chance to work on some really big accounts for Publix, AdventHealth, and South East Toyota. In between contracts with them I also worked for Checker and Rally's in there in house design studio. Boy did I learn about fast food. But while I was learning tons from others I hated working 9-5 everyday and I slowly started to build up my own clients and take jobs for myself.
I finally left the corporate design world and started my own agency Erica Holland Design and here we are today. We work with clients all over the country creating beautiful brands and websites and I couldn't be happier to be following my dreams!
