CEILI OLIVIA | ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

Ceili Olivia is a multidisciplinary designer based in Burlington, Vermont, currently pursuing her BFA in Graphic Design at Champlain College. Her creative voice is bold, chaotic, and emotionally resonant, filled with expressive typography, layered textures, and a love for breaking the traditional rules of design. Ceili’s work lives at the intersection of feeling and form, designed to make viewers pause, process, and feel.

Influenced by postmodernism, Ceili’s standout projects often blend personal storytelling with conceptual experimentation. In an advanced art history course, she created a 20+ page book inspired by Wolfgang Weingart, visually exploring how time feels slower in childhood and speeds up with age. Using fragmentation, shifting scale, and layered textures, the piece leaned into memory and distortion, creating an off-kilter feeling, like a half-remembered dream.

Beyond classwork, Ceili brings her perspective to client work. For artist Devon Dutchmaster, she designed the album art for Puzzle Pieces, a conceptual piece reflecting emotional fragmentation. The result was a raw, tactile collage that layered photographs, puzzle piece motifs, and patterns to visually express the sense of incompleteness and discovery embedded in the music.

Her creative process starts with listening, researching audiences, identifying trends, and building visual rules around color, type, and texture. From there, she embraces critique and collaboration, constantly refining her work through feedback.

In addition to design, Ceili dabbles in photography, cinematography, and recently, UX/UI, adding new tools to her growing portfolio. She’s drawn to culturally relevant themes, projects that challenge her, and collaborations that feel authentic.

See more of Ceili’s evolving work on Instagram @designsbyceili, with a full portfolio linked in her bio.