Kate Kelly Design

About Kate Kelly Design

Kate Kelly Design is the place for unique, whimsical, custom illustrations and art for weddings, the home, stationery and more. Kate uses art and design to celebrate your story and make your wedding everything you could have dreamed up and more.

Kate started Kate Kelly Design in 2013 as a “passion project” on the side while she worked full time in financial services. And in 2020, after 14 years in finance, in the midst of the pandemic, she realized there wasn’t a moment to lose, threw caution to the wind and quit her "day job” so she could make Kate Kelly Design her full-time focus.

Kate is an artist, illustrator and designer. She grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, attended Dartmouth College in New Hampshire where she studied Comparative Literature in French Philosophy and dabbled in Studio Art. She lived abroad in Paris and finally landed in New York, where she has studied Interior Design at Parsons School of Design (where an interior rendering class reignited her childhood love of watercolors) and completed her MBA at Columbia Business School. Trips to Asia, Africa and the American West and a lengthy stint in the Hamptons (thanks, 2020!) have further influenced her aesthetic.

She met her now-lawyer-husband Matt in college, married him in 2010 (further inspiring her love of all things wedding), and now has free rein to bother him with questions like, "Do you like this chair?" (He's learned to say yes.) They welcomed their sons Michael in 2016 and Theo in 2018 and have never loved anything more. Michael and Theo are Kate's muses and inspire her to see the world through their eyes - a world of color and wonder and imagination.

Kate's creative focus is on making things beautiful, unique and personal through color, paint, texture and space. And her personal focus is on helping others get inspired to share with the world their ideas and vision. To celebrate the joys and sorrows and everything in between. To tell their story through art. To make their world a little more beautiful. To feel heard. To find home. To realize they’re already there. And to do it with a wink and a little whimsy.

Kate Kelly Design Core Values:

Kate Kelly Design is about love, celebration, self-expression, diversity and inclusion. It's about the beauty around and in all of us. It's about living a life that is true to you. KKD advocates for anti-racism and the equality of all humankind. If this is not your value set, Kate invite you to shop elsewhere. But before you do, she invites you first to have a conversation with her to help get you on the right side of the fence so that we can all together dismantle systemic racism and advocate for the equality of all. Kate believes in a "you do you" philosophy but has a hard stance on racism, classism and genderism and would venture to say that if you're lukewarm in this space, you're in fact not "doing you" to the fullest.