hello @ alexkostiw.com ︎

913 543 20 35
Chicago, Illinois

For over seven years, I have worked with clients in art and culture, fashion, and publishing. Together, we tell stories through design.

I specialize in Print & Publication Design, Visual Identity, and Graphic Art. My design approach helps give focus to a client’s point of view through expressive, nuanced solutions. Built on research, aesthetic and conceptual exploration, and collaborative conversations, my work balances vision with craft.

I’m excited most by projects that connect audiences with creative voices and those that center narrative experiences through physical spaces and forms.

Brute is the moniker for my self-publishing practice. My books and works on paper focus on inexactness in communication—felt spaces where instinct and imagination meet to make meaning.

Rooted in design, printmaking, and literary criticism, my work experiments with poetic and reimagined text and image, visual structures of comics, and conceptually driven forms. Its loose narratives gesture toward the hidden parts and possibilities of the self, particularly in relation to understandings of reality and our connections with others. My work has explored myth-making, transformation through magic, visualizations of interior life as landscapes, emotion on the cusp of expression, and absence.

My work has been in expos internationally and is collected in the Joan Flasch Artist’s Book Collection, the Chicago Zine Collection at the University of Chicago Library, the Zine and Comics Collection at the MassArt Library, the Decker Library at MICA, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, among others.

I teach courses in graphic design and storytelling at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I received an MFA in Visual Communication Design. And indeed, I’ve always loved books—I hold a BA in English literature from the University of Chicago.

If you’d like me to talk with folks about comics at the intersection of poetry and design, I offer a generative workshop all about that.

Thank you for reading. ︎︎

I’m Alex—I give shape to stories as a graphic designer, artist, and educator in Chicago. Take a look︎, read a bit about me, or get in touch.