From the HIES art studio and theatre stage to award-winning creative campaigns, Kendall Konenkamp '13 has built a career bringing ideas to life through design and storytelling. Now a senior designer at Publicis, Kendall has created work for brands like Netflix, Amazon, Budweiser and Sony, earning recognition from the Clio Awards, Shorty Awards and the Webbys.

In this interview, our director of Fine Arts Heidi Domescik caught up with Kendall to hear what a day in the life of a designer looks like, the inspiration behind projects like Version THAT—an AI experiment that led to the "Letters From Vincent" experience at the Immersive Van Gogh exhibition—and how her time in HIES theatre and visual art helped spark a lifelong love of creative work.

If someone followed you around for a "day in the life" documentary at work, what would they see you doing as an art director?

The role of an art director can mean slightly different things depending on the company, but at its core, the job is about solving communication problems visually. Much of my day involves designing and reviewing design. I am constantly asking questions like: How should this be laid out? What visuals make the message clearer? How can we make this idea more engaging?

Earlier in my career, that often meant concepting campaigns. That involves coming up with big ideas for ads or branding and designing the visuals that bring those ideas to life. It also includes collaborating with writers, presenting work to clients and sometimes going on shoots to help oversee how the visuals are captured.

Currently, I work as a senior designer at Publicis on a team that supports Pfizer. Our team functions like an internal design studio. Different groups come to us when they have something complex that requires clearer communication, which we provide through stronger hierarchy, layouts and visuals.

A lot of that work includes executive presentations, brand guidelines and digital assets. Day to day, I work in Figma and Adobe programs like Illustrator, Photoshop and After Effects. I also spend a good amount of time designing presentations in PowerPoint.

Midway through my career, I developed a niche designing highly crafted pitch decks used to present ideas to clients. Each slide is treated almost like an ad or a poster rather than a typical slide. Because this work often contains confidential client material, I share examples through a password-protected portfolio with anonymized content and placeholder text. That specialization helped lead to some of my roles, and today I apply many of the same storytelling and design principles to executive communications. 

On your website, you highlight the campaign for the final season of Netflix’s "Never Have I Ever," where your team created a “yearbook” concept to celebrate the show’s ending. What was the most fun part of designing something that fans would immediately recognize and connect with?

Working in entertainment was especially fun because you are designing for audiences who already care deeply about the show. With "Never Have I Ever," there was a very passionate fan base, so the work focused on celebrating something people already loved.

The yearbook concept was a natural fit because the show centers around high school and growing up. It allowed us to create playful and nostalgic content that fans could immediately recognize.

The most rewarding part was seeing the response from fans online. When people get excited about something you helped create, and you see them sharing it and engaging with it, that is a really special feeling.

You created the technology behind Version THAT before partnering with the Immersive Van Gogh exhibition for "Letters From Vincent." How did the idea of letting people "write" with famous voices come about?

This project evolved pretty organically. At the agency where I worked at the time we set aside time to experiment with new ideas or technologies we were curious about. The original idea started with our boss, who is a huge Prince fan. He once said he wished he could write like Prince because he considered him a lyrical genius and one of the greatest songwriters. One of our technologists suggested building a Slack bot trained on Prince’s lyrics so people in the office could chat with a Prince-like voice.

This was in early 2020, before tools like ChatGPT were widely available, so it felt very novel at the time. Once we built the bot, everyone in the office had lots of fun interacting with it and we realized the idea could grow into something bigger.

We expanded it into a website where people could write in the style of different authors. When choosing writers, we looked for distinctive voices and also for authors with large bodies of publicly available writing that could responsibly train the system. We also consulted an advisory board to help ensure we were using the material appropriately and that the writers we selected represented a diverse range of voices. That is how we landed on authors like Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gabriela Mistral and Phyllis Wheatley alongside Prince.

If you are interested in learning more about the process of building Version THAT, my coworker Julia Gorbach wrote a detailed article about the project.

Your work often lives on social media, where visuals have about half a second to grab someone's attention. What is one design trick or storytelling approach you rely on to make people stop scrolling?

I try to approach social media like any other design problem. The first question is always who the audience is and how they already interact with the platform.

For a fan community, such as fans of a TV show, the design goal is often to enhance moments they already love. That might mean editing clips in a punchy way or designing animated typography that matches a line's delivery so the moment feels more dynamic and shareable.

For audiences who may not know the brand yet, the design solution can be different. Sometimes, highly polished visuals stand out. Other times content works better when it feels more native to the platform, like meme formats or graphics created using the tools inside apps like TikTok or Instagram.

Because social content moves quickly, strong visual references and clear design systems are really helpful. Establishing a recognizable style makes it easier to produce content efficiently while still keeping it engaging.

You were involved in both theatre and visual art at HIES. If you could design a campaign or visual identity for one of your high school productions today, which would you choose, and what would it look like?

One that immediately comes to mind is our production of "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" in 2010. The director set it in the 1960s, which offers such a rich visual language to explore. Psychedelic color, expressive typography and the bold graphic style of concert posters from that era would be really fun to work with.

That said, the poster for that production was designed by Derek Yaniger, an accomplished mid century modern artist and HIES parent at the time, and it was fantastic. It would definitely feel intimidating to follow that. But it would also be a fun creative challenge to reinterpret it in a new way!

Another one would be "Grease," which we did in 2009. The 1950s aesthetic with diner signage, chrome lettering and vintage illustration offers a lot of great visual inspiration. I actually got to work on social content and a pitch deck for Paramount’s series "Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies," which was such a fun project to be part of. 

Looking back, my time in the arts at HIES really helped spark my love of design, storytelling and performance. Whether it was art classes, theater productions or singing in a cappella, it gave me the chance to explore how joyful and rewarding creative work can be. Moments when I can look at something and say, "Look at this cool thing I got to make" remind me why I stuck with this career. Being part of that community in middle school and high school was such a joy and one of my favorite parts of my time as a Golden Bear. I'm really grateful to all the art department teachers who made that experience possible and so special.