Kelly Guo
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Kelly Guois recent graduate from Boston University from earning a BFA in graphic design with a minors in business and innovation & entrepreneurship. She grew up in Brooklyn, NYC and is currently located there. Her work explores the interplay between experiences and joy. Drawing inspiration from cultural traditions and childhood nostalgia, she invite viewers a moment to pause, reflect, and celebrate the beautiful messiness of simply being human. Through a practice of designing interactive components her work encourages audience participation and fosters a sense resonance.
LinkedIn
Instagram

Selected Works
Adumbrate
Unburrowing Time Capsules
Po Sum On

Thesis
Light as Air, Heavy as Time
2025 BFA Thesis Branding

Client Work
 guts.
Gelly (MIT)
Spheric Bio (MIT)

Exhibition / Installation
Sown Together
BU Beach Wishing Tree
Modular Alphabet

Branding / Campaign 
Security Magnet
GovBall
Multiple Formats

Event Planning
Catch it While You Can
Untangle Launch Parties
Untangle Workshops
Untangle Photoshoot

Posters
I Love  / I Hate
Boston Out Loud

Social Media
 Pentel of America

Archive
Community Installation
Alphabet Posters
Studio Ghibli Cookbook
Order In Chaos
Kelly’s Animated Personas
On This Day






LIGHT AS AIR,
HEAVY AS TIME


Senior Thesis
2025 Light as Air, Heavy as Time explores the relationship between joy/happiness and temporality by transforming materials associated with play into tools that design experiences and forms of archival.

My thesis projects uses design as a channel to facilitate conversations and opportunities for revisiting objects and traditions associated with our intersecting identities. How can we use design to better interpret and visualize the impermanence of experiences?

While learning what it means to design joy for others (particularly in curated spaces and events), my thesis continues to evolve into 5 phases of temporary happiness: Spark, Float, Glow, Pop, and Combust. These terms began to develop into the different ways that I have identified in joy manifesting. 



2025 BFA
THESIS SHOW


Branding
2025
The 2025 BFA Thesis Show is a celebration of 
the interwoven efforts of Boston University’s class of 2025 Painting, Sculpture, and Graphic Design students. Through years of cultivating artistic identities, technical forte, and our community, these SVA students have shaped a body of work that reflects their unique authorship and boundless potential.

The 2025 BFA Thesis Show marks a pivotal moment 
in their cyclical journey and honors all they have built while embracing the uncertainties and possibilities ahead. The show is a testament to their dedication 
and grit, the product of collective efforts, and their continuous evolution and growth. The abundance of the SVA experience is demonstrated in this show as they walk into a new chapter of their careers, more confident and determined than they ever were.



guts.


Branding
2025 Guts’ rebrand is inspired by the belief that mental health learning should feel natural, connected, and shared.

Just like a conversation over coffee, guts exists to make mental health education accessible, practical, and community-centered. The vision is a world where understanding your mind feels inviting rather than clinical or isolating. 

Our approach is approachable and genuine, offering evidence-based tools that are easy to use right away. The identity is playful and bold, reminding us that mental health can be both serious and fun. Each element works together to break down barriers, create warmth, and welcome communities who have often been excluded from mental health spaces. The identity is vibrant, fresh, and a little unexpected, designed for a demographic that is curious, open to learning, and ready to engage with mental health.



ADUMBRATE


Posters, Zine & Interactive Website
2024 Adumbrate: to represent in outline, indicate faintly. The series explores how the clouds and sky pertains to our emotions and thoughts. Clouds completely lack objectivity: A notion found in the use of the cloud like ‘thought bubble’ in cartoons. It is a convention that links the mental privacy of subject states with clouds. They are the embodiment of everything flighty and thus inspire comic commentary on how people manage to create meaning out of the blue. This project also further examines how thoughts form and interwin between people while creating opportunities for creativity. 


Unburrowing
time capsules


Campaign, Branding & Zine
2024We all have a memory that we've worn thin...Stretched and crumpled up in a pocket…Unburrowing Time Capsules is a campaign that explores forgotten childhood memories, digging deeper beyond what is obvious. It encourages us to to reflect on the memories that we might or might not recognize making us who we are today. The campaign connects essential memories in relation to taste, objects, and people. Goldfish is the mascot of this project as they have been used in film and media to represent memories that experiences that holds dear to people's hearts.



Sown together


Exhibition design 
2024
The Fall 2024 Boston University Graphic Design Senior Exhibition, Sown Together, cultivates the metaphor of a garden and the interwoven practice of design to explore the balance between individual expression, collaborative innovation, and collective growth.

Inspired by the way gardens thrive in their diversity, Sown Together is its own vegetable garden where ideas and individuality are planted side by side. Our garden is modular and interconnected in nature, sectioned by “vegetable” to showcase overlapping themes and subjects; Sown Together demonstrates how distinct perspectives come together to enrich our design landscape. Every student’s work brings something unique, adding color and depth to this collective and flourishing garden.

Sown Together stitches together the colorful textiles of forty-four Graphic Design BFA candidates’ “New Horizons” projects and senior thesis explorations. With a playful and organic approach, we embrace the raw, evolving side of graphic design. Just as plants grow stronger when nurtured alongside others, the GD class of 2025 celebrates the collaborative nature of design, growing together as a unified, yet diverse, creative community.

BU Beach
wishing tree


Installation, branding
2024
Inspired by the ritual of Chinese Wishing Trees, BU Beach Wishing Tree is a location specific installtion that is confessional and spontaneous at a scaled that is shared collabrative to make people feel hope and gratefulness.


PO SUM ON



Book, Motion Graphic
2023
50 compositions derived from the graphic elements of Po Sum On’s packging. For more than a hundred years, with its well-known Medicated Oil and Healing Balm, Po Sum On has been an integral part of Hong Kong people’s life and has become a must-have in every household’s medicine cabinet. 



boston out loud


Visual Identity
Poster Series
2023Visual Identity follows a bold and playful aesthetic inspired by cartoons and comics. 
Final set followed by two alternate sets.

Security Magnet


Branding
2024Security Magnet is branding of places that skaters are not allowed to skate at, but proceeds to anyway. Public infrastructures propose challenges to those in the skate community that skate parks do not offer. Security Magnet not only brands these forbidden areas, but also brands the spirit of skate culture: rebelliouness and care-freeness.

GovBall



Visual Identity, Kinetic Typography
2024 The Governors Ball Music Festival (commonly known as Governors Ball or Gov Ball) is a multi-day music festival held in New York City. Launched in 2011 by original founders Jordan Wolowitz, Tom Russell, Yoni Reisman, the festival features an array of genres and styles of music, including rock, electronic, hip-hop, indie, Americana, pop, folk, and more.