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"If you&amp;#x27;ve spent five minutes on Pinterest, you&amp;#x27;ve probably repinned something from Joy Cho. And if you haven&amp;#x27;t heard of her, well, have you been on the Internet? As a graphic designer, Joy originally started her blog, Oh Joy!, as a creative outlet while between jobs. It turns out her appealing, accessible, and creative ideas have made her the most followed person on Pinterest, with more than 13 million followers to date. As if that weren&amp;#x27;t enough, Joy is a best-selling author, has a thriving YouTube channel, designs a variety of products, consults with leading companies, and, as all of you regular Toast blog readers know, on March 16, she&amp;#x27;ll debut a line of party supplies at Target. (It&amp;#x27;s the first time the brand has collaborated with top pinners on Pinterest to create a collection inspired by pinners.) Oh, and she has the most adorable two-year-old little girl, Ruby. Here, she fills in the blanks about life as the Pinterest queen. The thing that got me ahead was... Starting my blog. When I started Oh Joy in 2005, blogs weren&amp;#x27;t a job&amp;amp;#8212;they were considered a side project or a hobby. Little did I know that my blog would serve as my primary marketing tool for when I first started my own business later that year. And it&amp;#x27;s helped me immensely since then by giving me a place to share my ideas with others and share with them what I&amp;#x27;m working on. The worst financial mistake I made was... Starting a product line when I didn&amp;#x27;t have enough money to do it. I started a stationery line in 2007 and used mostly credit cards to fund the production. It was at a time when my husband and I were so broke that adding this debt to our lack of funds just wasn&amp;#x27;t a good idea. Luckily the line sold well, and I was able to pay off the debts. But if I could have done it differently, I would have saved up more money before expanding that part of my business. If I weren&amp;#x27;t in this job, I&amp;#x27;d... Be a kids&amp;#x27; martial arts instructor. I&amp;#x27;m a second-degree black belt and used to teach kids when I was in high school. The quality I secretly admire in others is... Those who walk to the beat of their own drum and don&amp;#x27;t care what people think. The one thing I&amp;#x27;d tell a design and decor newbie looking to make a great first impression is... Be clear about your point of view. Whether it&amp;#x27;s a style you like or a style that you&amp;#x27;re good at creating&amp;amp;#8212;or ideally both&amp;amp;#8212;make sure you express those styles in the way you decorate, the way you dress, and the way in which you present your brand. Later in your career, you can show more versatility and various styles, but in the beginning you really want people to see how good you are at one thing and that you&amp;#x27;re worth hiring for that look/style. My style over the years has evolved into colorful, whimsical, and full of color and pattern. I have a party collection with Target launching March 16 that brings that aesthetic to life in the form of party goods for Target shoppers to enjoy. The one design trick pretty much anyone can master is... Mixing and matching patterns! It can seem overwhelming at first because you don&amp;#x27;t want to look like you dressed yourself in the dark, but when it gets pulled together, it can feel really empowering and allow you to have more fun when getting dressed or decorating your home. The key is to mix the scale&amp;amp;#8212;a.k.a. the size&amp;amp;#8212;of the pattern. For example, you don&amp;#x27;t want to mix a jumbo polka-dot pattern with a jumbo floral pattern. Instead, mix a jumbo floral pattern with a tiny polka-dot pattern. When mixing patterns, try to have at least one of the colors in the patterns be the same. That way they feel like they go together without being exactly the same."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/inspired/2014/03/job-advice-from-oh-joy-blogger-joy-cho>