Hey, I’m Kayana!

We all have that special something that no matter what, it will always take us to our happy place. Maybe you just thought of yours; whether it’s luxurious food, or your favorite dessert after a long hard day, your favorite book that you can reread over a hundred times and not get bored, a calm game of golf, word puzzles, or maybe even hikes in a beautiful setting. For me, my happy place always revolved around art and design.

I can’t begin to explain how obsessed I am with colors. Like when the sky turns that beautiful pink, purple and gold, or just in a simple piece of fruit. People have often caught me staring in awe at an apple or mango at the grocery store, but I thought, how can one not stop and see how the shades of reds and greens overtake those pieces of fruit. I mean to most it’s just fruit, but to me it’s art. Like even the way colors blend and stand out, it’s just mesmerizing. And not just colors, but shapes as well. The crisp turquoise oceans in the Caribbean, reveal seashells of many shapes, or what I like to call them, little gifts from the sea. Being half Haitian and half Kittian, it was never a surprise to people when they’d come over to my family’s home and see vases filled with seashells. I used to love playing with them, just running my forefinger over their edges at the table.

You see I feel like I was born with a love for art. I was always appreciating the world around me. I have a twin sister and my parents would tell me that ever since I was able to hold my head up straight in my car seat, I would always be wide awake staring out the window, while my twin beside me slept away. Even now I am always sitting in a seat right next to the window, in a car, on a plane, or a bus you name it. With design, there is never a moment when you’re not taking in what’s around you. I can be walking down the street and new ideas will come to me of what to create next. Symbols are everywhere, on awnings of stores whether in English or not. Letterforms and accent marks, punctuation, the list goes on. Language is also design in my eyes. From studying Japanese for years and visiting the country, I’ve learned that the many characters of the language were art within themselves.

Seeing and creating. Art and design makes up who I am as a human being, as a person, who I was meant to be. I love being able to leave my trace through this field; a trace that others will want to follow along to see what more I have to offer, yearning to see what’s next. My desire to observe, make and create art and design, is my happy place.

It’s an amazing thing when you can combine the things you love to do to help other people. Being there to help others find their identity, to make them stand out from the rest, to accommodate their needs, make them happy, it’s what I love to do, and as a graphic designer, that’s what I’m here for.