Designing stories that connect.

hello @ alexkostiw.com ︎

913 543 20 35
Chicago, Illinois

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

I specialize in Book and Print Design, Visual Identity, Website Branding, and Graphic Art. Involved in every step, I translate my client’s message into thoughtfully crafted solutions built on research, exploration, and collaboration.

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

Brute is my personal practice, exploring the primordial and the liminal in communication, where instinct and imagination meet.

With roots in design, printmaking, and literary criticism, I use poetic and adapted writing and image, narrative structures of comics, and conceptually driven forms to make gestural works about connecting with others and one’s self. My focus is on the language of fragments as describing experience, interior life, raw feeling.

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, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Library of Congress.

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 yes, I’ve always loved books—I hold a BA in English literature from the University of Chicago.

I love talking with folks about comics at the intersection of poetry and design, and offer a workshop that investigates design as a generative tool for storytelling. ︎

Hello there.

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.