Kyla May is an Australian art director, illustrator and graphic designer. She started her career as a photographer, and then went back to university to study design, receiving a Bachelor of Arts Degree from R.M.I.T. in Visual Communication and Graphic Design. After graduating from university, Kyla was picked up by Clemenger BBDO Melbourne and trained to be an art director by some of Australia’s top advertising creatives.
By 27 years of age, Kyla had won or been nominated for many prestigious industry awards across print, radio and TV, including a nomination for the highest accolade in international advertising, a Gold Lion from the Cannes Advertising Festival. Kyla then joined Clemenger’s interactive agency and trained as an interactive art director, creating award-winning websites for Mercedes Benz and Mars.
In her “spare time,” Kyla created a range of greeting cards. Serendipitously, this little range of 12 cards grew to 120 cards in 3 months, becoming one of Australia’s top selling card ranges, and winning many local and international awards. Eventually,
Kyla left advertising to manage her own licensing business, selling product ranges all over the world.
Kyla’s greeting cards caught the eye of a publisher from Penguin Books in New York, who offered Kyla a children’s book deal.
Since then, she has illustrated, written and designed six children’s book series for Scholastic US, Penguin US, Penguin Australia and Pan McMillan Australia.
One of these book series led to Kyla being commissioned to create her first animated television series for Moody Street Kids.
Kyla has been the art director for the Moody Street Kids animated series “SheZow”, “Flea-bitten”, “G2G: Got to Go” and “Sumo Mouse”, as well as “The Day my Butt went Psycho” for Studio Moshi.
In between television series, Kyla also worked at Moose Toys, Australia's number one toy business as the art director for girls products.
For the past 5 years, Kyla has worked on the hit Nick Jnr animated TV series "Kuu Kuu Harajuku", created for Gwen Stefani, Moody Street Kids, Channel Ten Australia and Nickelodeon US. Kyla has worked as series art director, concept artist, character, background and prop designer, colour stylist, style guide designer and brand manager, which included designing a toy range for Mattel US.