Kelsie Ryon
Production Artist
Creative Director
Product Designer
Graphic Designer
Art Director
I’m extremely curious by nature and take a deep, research driven and holistic approach to anything I design.
Officially I studied Graphic Design, Advertising Design and I have an MFA in Poetry.
However, my work experience (and interests) gave me deep insight into many fields such as consumer psychology, psychology, philosophy, liberal arts, art history, fashion, toy design, product prototyping, children's books, graphic design, advertising design, literature, film making, marketing, commercial real estate, healthcare, tech innovation, business fundamentals.... in short, I’m a polymath.
As an artist and designer, I value the different ways mediums can be expressive.
What this means for my clients is that I bring this holistic approach and deep, contextual critical thinking skills to my work. All art is interpretive, and specifically poetry is about merging the emotional and intellectual, contextualizing the experience and reinterpreting it. When I design I consider all forms of expression of an idea and will suggest that to clients.
In very practical terms this means that during ideation and concept work, I take a very comprehensive, curatorial approach and align all design parameters to fit with real, results driven business goals.
I love all my babies, so it's hard to choose LOL!... and, what I truly cherish is when I help my clients merge and align their products, marketing, brand messaging and design choices with their business goals.
Here’s an example:
I was invited by Brave Bison, a social marketing company last year to give a Masterclass. The goal was to demonstrate how I was using generative A.I. tech in my design work.
The client was New Balance and I created an entire concept case study for them.
Using my holistic approach, I was able to imagine an entire line of highly fashionable clothing customized and augmenting their marathon fashion line.
The concept I created was to use glowing light-reflective features integrated as a print design with the map of London as a design motif.
Then I showed how this feature could also be streamlined into their brand as a highly impactful advertising visual, as part of branded messaging (both practically and metaphorically; in that reflective gear keeps runners safe during dark training hours), as a PR stunt before and during the marathon by making stunning aerial visuals of glowing throngs of people lit up through the marathon paths as one example.
I did something similar for Nike and Tiffany when their collaborative stunt for a sneaker last year flopped on socials.
I reimagined a concept that celebrated both brands: Nike for fashionable comfort and Tiffany for celebrating momentous occasions. I visualized the collaboration concept as one that celebrated wedding shoes and created a line of highly fashionable, but wearable, wedding sneakers. As a fun fact, Tiffany actually created such a shoe a month after I posted my idea on socials. So that was cool!
As I mentioned above, I think about things very holistically and always consider the practical applications and my design concepting is driven toward achieving real goals. There's an art to business and I having worked in product development, spent time in Y Combinator's accelerator school, I always have my eye on the prize for my clients.
Well, creativity first came naturally for me... when I discovered in grade school kids lining up for me to help them in art class.
But in all honesty, my creativity is deeply connected to my spirituality.
I am the granddaughter of four grandparents who survived the horrors of Auschwitz and Nazi genocide. Growing up in their homes taught me the razor-sharp line of balancing a philosophical commitment to ideals with a world that wanted to expunge those ideals. This relationship between the philosophical and the practical is what heightened my connection to language.
It’s what drove me to think. And thinking through the philosophical chaos drove me to write and study poetry: The attempt to capture, apprehend and distill unwieldy ideas.
The rest of my life and career is a reflection of that.
Art, for art's sake is not valued in the Jewish orthodox community. As survivors, practical application of skill is vital, so that always drove me to push myself to channel my creative proclivities into pragmatic applied solutions.
For this reason I always had to channel my creative nature. At the time I started graphic design was a way for me to use my natural artistic abilities in a commercial way. But I'm restless, and curious, and so I ventured into many other areas of design and literature with an eye towards commercial viability.
I guess you could say, my creative passion and pursuits will always skew towards meaningfulness. I love to find design solutions that are economical, efficient, sustainable and still have a deep emotional impact. In the end art is about expression but design is solution oriented. I love finding the perfect balance between the two.
I think I'm very helpful in the ideation and concept phase because I have a knack for interpreting ideation into meaningful concrete ideas that align with business goals.
I no longer have to manipulate finicky mediums like watercolor or digital art and instead generative A.I. tech enables me to express myself in any medium I can imagine. I am doing things like "impossible faux-tography," and photoshop hacks and creating things that would take a team of people to produce. I can converge the role of strategy and execution in that I can execute my own vision.
I like to take on work that helps clients imagine the impossible across a spectrum of deliverables.
I do heavy research into every project I undertake. There's never a dearth of inspiration when you study the history and context of a topic. And now, A.I. tech let's me imagine anything.