Hello, my name is Jocelyn Stewart. I am a Finnish American illustrator and designer in northeastern Ohio with experience in social media content creation. I love bright colors, chunky typefaces, and lots of patterns. But no worries if that's not your speed! More than that, I love learning about my clients and building exciting designs and identities that align with their interests and values.If you would like to learn more about my work, please consider clicking my portfolio link! If you would like to learn about me, check out my about me link!

* Let's Get In Touch!

* All About Me...

Jocelyn Stewart is a graphic designer and illustrator with a defined background in fine arts. She will be graduating Spring 2026 from Kent State University with her bachelor's in Visual Communication Design. She is currently the Social Media Intern at Zygote Press in Cleveland, OH!Her design work can be described as excitingly charming! In her free time, she loves playing Dance Dance Revolution, cross-stitching, watching old movies, and listening to her large collection of CDs!Born in Pennsylvania and raised in over five states, Jocelyn is greatly inspired by people and the allure of bright colors. According to her, life is too short for beige, black, and white. Life should be polka dots and striped multicolor lines. Having lived in and visited so many different places, Jocelyn works hard to ensure that all different types of people are represented and seen in her work. Through her designs, she wants to create a world where kindness and empathy are matter-of-course.

For information about her work history, please refer to her portfolio! She also posts her art to Instagram and Bluesky!

This project was a group effort with designers John Jackson and Gianna Giocomelli. Our goal was to create a conceptual exhibition for Cleveland Botanical Gardens with a focus on children's interests through physical activity and education.

* Research and Sketching Process

Our group's work started with extensive research of both the Cleveland Botanical Gardens and children's museum activities. We went back and forth quite a bit with ideas and how to best execute them, mostly discussing ways to safetyproof our exhibit so children couldn't injure themselves with the moving parts.For our walls, we decided to create . . .
1. An interactive spider web, where children can create their own spider web by wrapping the string along a hexagonal peg board. On the string, there are wooden spider and bug charms so they can move across the string and effectively chase one another across it. (SPIDER CHASE)
2. Information cubes that are in the same style as playground tic-tac-toe boards. But, instead, have information about Ohio native flora. (FLOWER POWER)
3. A plain informational wall featuring a native Ohio fish, amphibian, and reptile. (AQUATIC MAYHEM)For our ideation, we focused a lot on famous children's illustrator and storyteller Eric Carle. Specifically, we looked at his ways of creating simple shapes and textures into cohesive illustrations.

* My Part — Illustrations and Final Design

For my part of the workload, I was tasked with . . .
- Copywriting and information on our main exhibit wall. Creating our titles and sentences introducing the information.
- Creating the bottom environmental textures of the wall.
- Helping John with painting our watercolor textures and scanning them in at 1200 DPI.
- Creating the visuals for the spider web wall. Including the wooden charms and set up of information and text.
- Creating visuals for the aquatic mayhem wall.
- Creating the leaf shapes that mimic Cleveland Botanical Gardens visual marketing throughout Hershey Children Gardens.I also created a mockup in order to show the size of the board. It stands around 4.5 feet tall, the average height of an 8 year old child. We wanted it to be eye-level with our demographic.

SKEDADDLE is a typeface created for a conceptual Western film festival. It is meant to look somewhat handwritten, bouncy, and playful. It works well as body type.

* Skedaddle Process

Skedaddle was born from a logo prototype called KANTIG, designed for a German expressionist film festival. Skedaddle is handmade for a conceptual Western film festival, meant to work as body type in adverts and marketing.It is defined by its handwritten feel, playful shapes, and creative solutions.

* Skedaddle Zine Piece

The typeface was featured in the Typeface Design Zine of Spring 2026. For this opportunity, I was able to display the typeface in a creative zine with my wonderful peers. The final product was printed in the Riso

This illustration was done while in attendance at Kent State University's VCD 42006 Character Development: Animals and Environments course. During this time, I learned a lot about the importance silhouette in figures and visual storytelling. The illustration is based off of the short story "Alert But Not Alarmed" by Shaun Tan, where every American house has an inactive missile attached to it.

* Alert But Not Alarmed, Tales from Outer Suburbia

While illustrating for this concept, I was thinking of seaside towns in places like Iceland and Maine. I was thinking about how these large, inactive missiles standing out of the ground resemble lighthouses, and how if decorated and painted, could probably look a great deal like one.
The town is several little houses, connected to each other with bridges. They hang their clothes and kites off these inactive missiles. They paint them like they paint their houses, but with even more colorful shapes. They are so beyond inactive, birds are sleeping on them.
I was working a lot with texture and blocky shapes made with only a shape tool. After a bit of time, I played a lot more into this almost children's book-like feel.

Bellora is a conceptual cookie brand, inspired by real Austrian linzer cookie recipes and meant to be enjoyed with coffe or tea. Bellora's target demographic is the café lover, and it is mainly sold in single packs at local cafés.

* Creating the Brand Identity

While creating the brand identity for the fictious Bellora, I kept three words in mind: "soft," "warm," and "traditional." Naturally, the center shape was always this beautiful scalloped circle, meant to be the shape of the cookie before the consumer even saw it out of its packaging. The typeface beneath, Freude, is perfectly playful and round.

* The Packaging

While creating the packaging for Bellora, the most important element in my mind was its ability to reseal. The pack comes with two cookies, packaged on top of one another. I wanted to keep in mind the consumer who doesn't eat everything in one sitting. I wanted to create packaging that could easily fold back up and stayed unique!
The background is all hand-illustrated patterning, featuring the main ingredient that separates all the different flavors apart. The red is strawberry creme, and the red correlates to a red berry. The pistachio creme is a light lime green, meant to resemble a green pistachio nut. Finally, the hazelnut creme flavor is a light blue instead of brown in order to look more appealing when they are all on a shelf together. The baby blue color is also a perfect contrast against the brown hazelnut creme in the cookie!Pictured below is the flavor illustrations.

BAGGED: The Plastic Bag Museum is a fictitious branding project focused on bringing attention to the history of design followed through plastic shopping bags. In this project, I wanted to develop my Photoshop skills through editing and playing with layers by pushing elements in the photography forward and back. The pops of color are meant to replicate digital printmaking like riso, and the photos themselves are photoshopped to be more textured and real.

* Informational Pamphlet

The informational pamphlet is a piece that would be included in our guerilla advertising efforts. Our plans involved going into stores and replacing their plastic bags with our own that had these pamphlets inside of them.
This pamphlet displays all of our brand colors, our type based logo, as well as all our information about the fictitious art gallery!

* Set of 3 Posters

These posters were done with tons of Photoshop and Illustrator work! The photos are manipulated to be more textured with the black and white half tones. Then, certain elements are pushed back or pulled forward to create a background/foreground with the type and other graphic elements. Each poster displays one pop of color from the brand style guide.

Twice Loved Teddy is a fictitious teddy bear restoration company that focuses on repairing stuffed animals as a solution to excess toy waste in landfills. It's goals are to reduce waste and breathe life back into teddy bears that have been loved through generations.

* Twice Loved Teddy Style Guide

To begin this project, this fictitious brand needed some identity. I created the logo from sketches of cute teddy bears, and found his solemn expression to really tug on heartstrings. For the colors, I brought in warm, traditional browns and modernized them with bright pops of pink and red.
The type is more handwritten, almost like it is written with crayon or chalk. It brings back that nostalgic, childhood feeling.

* Twice Loved Teddy Packaging

For the packaging of this brand, I wanted to create multiple charming and repeating patterns. I wanted it to look like fabric that you can buy from the store by the yard. As if you could pull it and make a quilt from it! The box is meant to really stand out. Then, the bears are wrapped in the patterned tissue paper, which then gets a personalized TLT label!

* Twice Loved Teddy Website

(LINK) The Twice Loved Teddy website is rather simple, but gets the point across! It has these almost delicious looking layers, like a cake. The cute scalloped moments on the page help in making it look youthful and fun.

* Twice Loved Teddy Poem Zine

Twice Loved Teddy has goals to table at toy conventions in NE Ohio. For these events, I wanted to have a cute take home item that was easy to print and stood out! For this, I wrote and illustrated a poem for our convention attendees to take home.

In this project, I focused on creating exciting, eye-catching typographic book covers for three very different pieces of writing. I learned so much from this project, and I love to look back on it as the moment where type design really "clicked" for me. Through this project, I learned how to match type faces with overall mood. Also, I learned about how composition works in typography.

* Crime and Punishment

For this cover, I wanted to push my understanding of colors and how "simple" shapes can create more complex compositions. I wanted to showcase my ability to create foregrounds and backgrounds with shapes. The skull, in red, almost just appears to be simple blood splatters. It really requires an extra second to look at and digest! I went even more into the blood splatter look by separating pieces of the skull into abstract pieces on the back panel.

* Developments in Dairy Cow Breeding: New Opportunities to Widen the Use of Straw

For this cover, everything but the type is entirely hand sewn by me. The cows are handsewn with felt, and I thrifted all the fabric and buttons. The other fabrics used on the page are all thrifted, then scanned. The type is meant to look like cross stitch patterns.

* A Death in the Family

This was the cover that made me fall in love with typography. For this cover, I wanted to explore both extreme compositions and color. I created this very dramatic composition with the dark grey completely overpowering the page. The white at the bottom acts as a point of visual interest, but also doubles as a sort of ground to the black sky.
There's tons of repeating patterns here with the coffin shape.

Apple Farm is a Youtube variety channel made up of several artists. I played a massive part in the channel's art direction - from creating the introduction to creating the logo to making character designs!

* Creating the Logo

For the channel logo, I wanted to take massive inspiration from Aranzi Aronzo's felt stitch work. In his felt work, seeing the stitches is part of the charm! I drew out an apple shape, fit the "farm" word inside of it, and then stitched it together with felt. Then, I scanned it, and it became real!

* Introduction

At the beginning of every video, this introduction will play. It centers the channel logo, and relies on the music and sound to propel the motion design forward. For this changing background, I took photos I had lying around in old SD cards and doodles. Their softness and pastel look really helped amplified the channel's cuteness and overall aesthetic.

Supermega is a comedy duo podcast and Youtube channel. In this fictitious brand reimagining, I focused on the pre-existing colors of their brand and emphasized it in illustration. I was able to showcase my ability to create exciting, dynamic compositions. In this project, I got to experiment with mashing together illustrative elements with real world photography. By the end of the project, I had learned an entirely new way to incorporate illustrations into photography, creating this animated look.

Fusion is Kent State University's LGBTQ+ magazine. Founded in 2003, Fusion remains the region's only student magazine focusing on LGBTQ+ issues. I worked with Fusion from August 2023 to January 2026, illustrating and designing for both print articles and digital articles.

* The Dating App Dilemma by Alex Miller (Spring '25 Issue)

I was given the honor of illustrating Alex Miller's article “The Dating App Dilemma” in the Spring 2025 issue of Fusion Magazine. I was able to work within the style guide in regards to typography and color palette, but still was given tons of creative freedom on the exact illustration. I wanted to do this with an intense green/pink color palette from the style guide with ghost apps floating around the page to represent the disorienting reality of dating apps. The ghost patterns are very abstract and off the page.

* Bottoms Up! (Spring '24 Issue)

For this issue of Fusion, we included a few articles about recipes and food. For this, I approached it thinking of it as a sort of grungy cookbook. Featuring our brightest colors of our style guide, and really explosive, sharp graphics.-

* How Kent State Recordkeeping is Putting Student Safety in Jeopardy (Online Article)

For this project, I needed to create a visual that was simple but heavy. In order to do this, I limited myself to only three colors. Then, I relied entirely on silhouettes until I added small details! The type on the letter was almost more important than the illustration itself. I made it super grungy and kind of off center in order to represent something darker.