Kelly Guo is recent graduate from Boston University, earning a BFA in graphic design with a minors in business and innovation & entrepreneurship. Originally from Brooklyn, NYC, and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 2021. 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 amongst people.
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Selected Works
Adumbrate
Unburrowing Time Capsules
Po Sum On
Thesis
Light as Air, Heavy as Time
2025 BFA Thesis Branding
Client Work
Gelly (MIT)
Spheric Bio (MIT)
Exhibition / Installation
Sown Together
BU Beach Wishing
Tree
Modular Alphabet
Community Installation
Branding / Campaign
Security Magnet
GovBall
Multiple Formats
Posters
I Love / I Hate
Boston Out Loud
Alphabet Posters
Publications
Order In Chaos
Kelly’s Animated Personas
Studio Ghibli Cookbook
On This Day
Event Planning
Catch it While You Can
Untangle Launch Parties
Untangle Workshops
Untangle Photoshoot
Archive
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.
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.
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.