Kelli Upshur Adds Color, With Feeling

Long before Kelli Upshur knew the term user experience, she knew how it felt when a world spoke directly to her.

For Kelli, the allure of a satisfying visual started early. Growing up on old-school Sesame Street and Mister Rogers and spending long stretches at her grandparents’ house, she and her sister would share their mother’s pink canopy bed. Picture: white furniture, stereo, record player, and cat-eye glasses that she found impossibly cool. All complete little worlds, in and of themselves. And then the family got its first PC and a dial-up modem.

“I was eight,” she says, “when I found a GeoCities website called All Hail Brak, dedicated to Brak from Space Ghost Coast to Coast, and that’s my first experience with HTML.”

To join the conversation, Kelli had to learn how the page worked. The forum made visitors type tags themselves (<b> for bold, <i> for italics), and her name remains on an archived Brak Mail page.

Petz, a PC game with customizable virtual animals, led her and her cousin to another GeoCities community, where she took hand-coded fan sites apart. They studied them and sketched out plans, watching people argue when one creator copied another’s design. These digital worlds were so important to not only to her, but to someone she loved, and a whole host of people she didn’t know, and never would.

Kelli now works across art direction, product design, UX/UI, identity, motion, packaging, and print. She studied studio art and art history at the University of Pittsburgh, earned a certificate in digital media, and studied art, photography, and drawing at Florence University of the Arts. Her career has also included photography, film, editing, a period running a video-production studio, and a role at VaynerMedia, working under Gary Vaynerchuk.

Since making her practice full-time in 2018, she has built Kelli Upshur LLC largely through repeat relationships and word of mouth. Her experience spans NBCUniversal, DreamWorks, Mattel, L’Oréal, Partake Foods, and work connected to the NFL, NCAA, NHL, and MLB, as well as a litany of start-up brands and small-to-midsize businesses.

That pattern includes Sageworx. For the past several years, Kelli has been a go-to art director and designer for the collective, contributing to internal work as well as client assignments for First Horizon Bank, Planview, Eargo, Kaiser Permanente, UBS Arena, and Seneca Resources. Her contributions range from educational content and global digital campaigns to product-launch concepts, experiential strategy, promotional film, and brand development.

Kelli can take an idea from the first sketch through format, budget, accessibility, production, and release. She knows how to play by the rules, navigating brand style and industry standards without her work losing its spark. But her north star is unwavering – everything hinges on what the audience is meant to see and feel once it’s out of her hands.

At Pitt, Kelli loved printmaking, painting, drawing, and the design fundamentals class where the work involved X-Acto knives rather than computers, but she never thought of her craft as screen versus studio.

Her cat-eye glasses were like the flash dress-up games online back in the aughts, a way to try on another era. GeoCities served as another wardrobe. By 15, Kelli’s Wacom tablet was as familiar as a pencil. For a high-school pARTfolio, she created odd watercolors and scanned pieces into a website. Pixels and paper shared the same frame, letting her explore color, texture, character, and feeling through the studio and the screen.

In one college media class, the professor told her, “Yeah, you just open InDesign and play around with it.” Kelli remembers asking, “You’re not gonna teach us InDesign?” The answer was no. “Okay.”

There’s no graduation date at Pixel University. After college, Kelli bought a book on responsive design. She taught herself Figma and now, she’s focusing on Framer, too. At Sageworx, she’s connecting Figma to creative AI systems so work can move fluidly, helping the team scale production for internal projects and client work. For Kelli, each new tool offers another way to reach the person the idea was made for.

“Every day, I’m learning new things,” she says. “Trying to push my skills, trying to perfect it more.”

The thing about being “self-taught” is that education never ends – there’s always something else to learn, and a better way to get an idea to whoever it was made for.

Kelli describes herself as a rule follower and a listener. Earlier in her agency career, louder colleagues sometimes claimed the discussion before she finished thinking, so her convictions tend to arrive as questions. Don’t let her disposition fool you. Her volume – or lack thereof – disguises her stubbornness.

“The goal of a designer is to always tell the client, ‘Look, we gotta think about the audience. What is your audience going to perceive? Not, do you like the color red? Why do you like the color red? Does it have anything to do with your audience? No? Okay, we should probably think about what your audience wants.’”

That’s empathy becoming part of a workflow. “We can use the same idea and campaign, look and feel,” she says, “but we need to think about how people are experiencing them.” A website won’t treat the audience in the same manner as a print piece, or out-of-home placement, would. Relentlessly, she studies the rules and best practices, so she can define where the audience will thrive. And then she colors it in.

Sageworx co-founder Patrick Conreaux saw Kelli’s method up close while the collective supported Allison + Partners on a global digital campaign for Planview. As they revised a series of ads in real time, he watched her move through Photoshop, erasing a background, dropping in files, and adjusting the composition faster than he could track. He was first astounded by Kelli’s speed, and then by her ability to connect Planview to its audience. In his words, there’s always one aspect of her work “that feels alive.”

Ask Kelli what makes an assignment satisfying and she does not start with awards or reach.

“I care so much about people’s projects. I just want to be like, ‘Let me help you. This is the one way I know I can help you,’” she says. “It just makes people happier. And it sells better too, so it makes people money.”

Recently, Kelli has brought that same care to packaging work for Partake Foods. In January 2027, she’ll be able to pick up the package and say, “I did that, that’s so cool. That’s in a grocery store somewhere I’ve never been to.”

Then Kelli goes back to her home office, where she usually works alone. Sageworx gives her peers who understand the choices behind the output without her having to defend her ideas: “There’s definitely not a tug and pull, at least with Sageworx, because a lot of people here are experts. We all have different backgrounds and different jobs that we’ve had in the past, but we all know how to work through it.”

Kelli remembers older designers dismissing Photoshop and digital tablets because “real” artists used physical tools, and yet, she also understands why artists object to systems trained on their work without their consent. Glaze, a project designed to disrupt style mimicry, wakes up her “down with the system” inner teenager.

“I’ve been using AI for years because Photoshop has implemented AI for a long time,” she says. Generative expansion can rescue an image without hours of hand repainting, leaving more time for decisions that require a critical eye.

But AI can’t tell you what good work looks like.

At home, Kelli sees contractors advertising expensive renovation services with obvious AI-generated flyers and questions their care. “If I’m paying you $50,000 to enclose my patio, can you just hire a designer for $250 to make a flyer?” she says.

She’s joking, yet the business point is serious. Faster production makes it too easy to publish work lacking taste, audience knowledge, and worst of all, care.

When Kelli reopened a portfolio from 2006, she found scanned textures and artistic choices made before years of corporate brand rules. “Wow. I really had something there,” she thought. “I should do that again.”

The board behind her monitor holds all sorts of art, illustration, and typography. Kelli has followed lettering artist Jessica Hische since high school, fascinated by changes so slight an untrained eye might miss them. Peter Max's psychedelic color and organic shapes still beckon, too.

She’s not alone – she’s watched brands reaching back, with Burger King and Pizza Hut returning to older visual identities. “Nostalgia is a helluva drug,” Kelli says. “It sells!” Modernization can mean fewer imperfections and textures. Or maybe more. Perhaps it’s really just about intention.

And when she logs off, she’s living her life the same way she creates art. Kelli designed her husband’s vintage-resale brand from an old T-shirt tag. She still carries the GeoCities experiments, the record player in her mother’s old bedroom, and the cat-eye glasses that made another era feel available to her.

After spending so much of her career pushing pixels, Kelli wants to create more with her hands whenever she can. “I really want to create stuff,” she says. “I want to illustrate again.”

At eight, All Hail Brak made a screen feel like a place built for her. Kelli knows the software and the skills and the rules will never stop changing, but she keeps learning them for the same reason she learned HTML: so someone on the other side can think, “Oh, this is for me.”

Follow Kelli on LinkedIn or explore her work at kelliupshur.com. To build a Sageworx team around your next creative challenge, connect with Sageworx.

Kelli Upshur is a Pittsburgh-based creative director, art director, product designer, UI expert, and active Sageworx Member.