Mary Jo Fasan’s Second Education

Mary Jo Fasan went to design school with a communications career already behind her. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied interior architecture, she met designers and manufacturers who wanted help explaining their work. They could make things. She knew how to make people pay attention. A classroom had furnished her with a business idea, which is a useful return on tuition.

Before that return to Chicago, she had worked at global agencies, independent firms and Marriott International. As a brand marketing director at Marriott, she combined public relations, marketing and branding. The experience gave her a way of thinking about a business as a connected story. At school, she found people whose work could benefit from precisely that approach.

She launched Jo Chicago in 2004. More than two decades later, as founder and CEO of Jo Communications, Fasan still works in the territory where a visual idea needs words, relationships and a reason for someone else to care. Her career offers an unusually literal example of finding your next job while studying something else.

A furniture maker, then a magazine cover

Fasan’s account of the beginning includes a revealing first client: el: environmental language. The company made residential furniture using sustainably sourced or repurposed materials. Here was something concrete to talk about: an object, the choices behind it, and the implications of those choices. The communications work had a subject beyond the product photograph.

Another early memory stayed with her. Jo’s first magazine cover featured Mary Jeanne Kneen, now of Kneen & Co., in the fall 2005 issue of Chicago Magazine’s Home. Looking back at the agency’s twentieth anniversary, Fasan recalled that cover alongside later placements in publications including AD and The New York Times. The early accomplishment remained worth remembering after the client list grew.

Her anniversary reflection also traced her interest in design back to working alongside Marriott’s design and development executives. She had watched ideas become installed environments. A brand could be encountered through a space, with people moving through the decisions that had brought it into being. That was fertile territory for a marketer with an interest in architecture.

The publicist who advised patience

By 2010, Fasan was advising architects on a problem that a handsome portfolio could not solve alone. Large practices had marketing departments; smaller practices often lacked dedicated help or a clear understanding of what they could do themselves. Her advice acknowledged both the resource gap and the time required to get results.

“It can take months or even a year,” she cautioned about putting a program into practice and seeing its effects. That is a bracing sentence to hear from someone selling communications services. It gives the client a calendar rather than a magic trick.

She also pointed to the range of possibilities available online: a website, participation in relevant discussions, blogging and social platforms. Read together, those recommendations suggest sustained participation. The practice would have to become visible through repeated, useful contributions. A single announcement could hardly carry the whole building.

There is a personal counterpart to that professional patience. Leslie Friebert, who later founded FORGE PR, remembered arriving at Fasan’s architecture and design agency after years in New York. Friebert described an immediate rapport, with complementary working styles. Fasan, she said, taught her the value of stepping back and slowing down.

Friebert’s recollection supplies a different measure of influence from a magazine placement. It describes a habit passed from one colleague to another. In a profession built around deadlines, the example she remembered was permission to take a breath before the next decision. A leader’s pace can become part of what colleagues carry into their own businesses.

Removing a city from the name

In May 2021, Fasan announced that Jo Chicago would become Jo Communications. Seventeen years into the business, the name had acquired a geographical boundary that she wanted to loosen. Her letter explained the change through the agency’s expanding ambitions for design, its audience and the reach of its work.

She thanked an assortment of clients: artists, architects, interior designers, developers, retailers, restaurants, manufacturers and nonprofits. The list gives a useful picture of her professional neighborhood. Different businesses sat within it, joined by questions about how people use places, objects and experiences.

Her letter made room for the team as well. Today, Jo’s own description identifies an all-women team led by Fasan, also known as MJ, with an emphasis on culture, community and connection. Those interests put people around the design work: the makers, the audiences and the communities in which a project has meaning.

The company’s development also brought opportunities for colleagues. In November 2022, Mary Mullen was promoted to vice president, with a move from Chicago to Florida to develop design partnerships. Fasan publicly credited Mullen’s strategic contribution. The expansion had a practical form: an experienced colleague building relationships in another market.

Holly Hunt, and the work around the work

In March 2023, Jo became the PR and communications agency of record for House of Hunt, the interior design studio led by Holly Hunt. Fasan was named as the lead on an assignment covering regional, national and international media relations, social media management and thought leadership. The brief crossed several channels while staying attached to one design practice.

It is a useful example of what her specialization entails. An established designer can have a recognizable name and still need a clear account of a particular studio, its work and its direction. Reputation gives a communicator material to work with; the assignment still requires decisions about audiences and emphasis.

In 2024, Fasan also highlighted Hunt’s forthcoming Rizzoli book, Holly Hunt: Fearless in the World of Design. A November photograph shared by Jo shows the agency with Hunt at a Chicago book signing. The public announcement and the small gathering belong to the same professional world: there is the story being told, and there are the relationships through which it travels.

Jo’s services give that work an explicit starting point. Its discovery process, Wayfinder, examines a client’s brand before producing a presentation and communications roadmap. Visual identity, planning, partnerships and written content follow within a broader program. For Fasan, the explanation begins before the pitch reaches an editor.

When the pitch and the business disagree

Fasan’s March 2026 essay on alignment brings the conversation down to commercial particulars. Marketing communications and business development, she argues, need shared goals even when their daily activities differ. Visibility should support the markets and opportunities a business actually wants to pursue.

She describes familiar points of friction: marketing chasing leads that sales cannot convert, or business development making promises unsupported by the brand’s message. Both examples concern a mismatch between what a company says and what it is prepared to do. A persuasive campaign can still be aimed at the wrong destination.

Her proposed discipline is coordination: consistent messaging, agreed objectives and close collaboration. Clicks and engagement can help assess a campaign, but the work also has to connect with conversations that might become business. The essay shows the marketer beneath the design enthusiast. A beautiful story has a job to perform.

“Design is a beautiful storyteller.”

Mary Jo Fasan · December 2024

A place for the imperfect photograph

Her writing about AI returns to the same concern with authorship. In May 2026, Fasan described using AI for initial research, grammar and spelling checks, and exploring ideas. She reserved the development of an individual perspective and the work of connection for people. Her closing principle was “supporting better human thinking rather than replacing it.”

That distinction extends into her observations about visual culture. In an essay on the return of handmade elements, she pointed to illustration, handwritten lettering, collage, paper textures and imperfect photography. She saw evidence of an appetite for work that retains visible traces of its maker.

Fasan includes her own agency in the discussion. AI helps Jo organize information, research and work efficiently; she even disclosed using it to check a newsletter draft for errors. Her interest lies in what people do with the time and tools available to them. Taste and judgment remain responsibilities to exercise.

The point feels at home in a career spent explaining design. A material choice, an unexpected composition or a particular detail can give the story its specificity. Smooth those away and the work risks becoming interchangeable. For a communicator, the imperfect photograph may contain the very thing worth describing.

Chicago still gets a seat at the table

The city disappeared from the agency’s name, but Fasan’s professional commitments remain closely connected to Chicago. She serves on the executive committee of Designs for Dignity, which brings donated materials and pro bono design services to nonprofit spaces. It is a practical setting for her belief that design affects everyday experience.

In 2026, Jo and THE MART brought another format into that network: The Quarterly Edit. Its first edition combined design conversation with a Wine Spectator tasting and support for Designs for Dignity. A later Design Chicago program assembled editors and contributors from shelter publications to discuss editorial relationships and the changing media landscape.

For someone whose business began by noticing what designers needed, the progression makes sense. Fasan has moved from helping individual practices explain themselves to helping convene conversations among the people who make, commission and publish design. There is still a room involved. This time, she helps bring the people into it.