Collection

Designers and artists worth knowing

People whose work you look at, and who kept a body of it that is entirely their own.

Design usually gets arranged as a service. Somebody hands over a brief, somebody makes it look good, everybody moves on and the work belongs to the client. Most of the people below quietly refused that deal. They design their own things, or they design for other people and keep something running on the side that nobody else gets to approve.

The range is wide. A product designer in Berlin who goes home and draws Bollywood posters. A Dutch digital artist three million people follow. A filmmaker making films about her own life. Three people who turned spreadsheets into things you would put on a wall.

The designers and artists

22 profiled so far, newest first.

• Krzysztof Grzybacz Paints by taking the paint off, so the colour left behind is the picture Krzysztof Grzybacz painted flowers as though they were people for years, and now paints people the same way, using a method where every mark is made by removal Kraków
• Amelia Wattenberger Argued that chatbots are the wrong interface for AI, in an essay you could play with, then went and designed the replacement Amelia Wattenberger said the text box was a dead end while the whole industry was shipping text boxes, and built the argument so you could operate it yourself
• Bartosz Ciechanowski Spends a year on one article, and every diagram in it is a working simulation Bartosz Ciechanowski publishes about once a year, which is exactly how long it takes to build an article where you can grab the physics
• Gaurabh Mathure Designed the Nike FuelBand, sold his company, then went on YouTube and taught himself to sell a $99 subscription Gaurabh Mathure had sixteen years and an acquisition behind him, and still let a camera watch him do beginner reps Brooklyn
• Nicky Case Made forty-two games and essays about hard ideas and put every one in the public domain Nicky Case built the thing everyone else would have founded a company on, then waived the copyright so anyone could take it Canada
• Simone Giertz Built machines designed to fail, which is much harder than building ones that work Simone Giertz spent years engineering robots to go wrong in exactly the right way, and now runs a design company where nothing does Los Angeles
• Ahmad Shadeed Writes from Tulkarm, read by the whole industry Ahmad Shadeed explains CSS more clearly than almost anyone alive, from a town in the West Bank, for the half of the web most developers forget exists Tulkarm, Palestine
• Emil Kowalski His code ships fifty million times a week, his name almost never does Emil Kowalski wrote two components you have used today without knowing it, and built a career on knowing when not to animate
• Josh W Comeau Teaches the most tactile thing on the web, once spent six months unable to touch a keyboard Josh W Comeau built a career on interfaces you can grab and drag, and then had to teach himself to code without hands Montreal
• Aashish Kumar Ten years designing for other people, now shipping his own Aashish Kumar was founding designer on a protocol that moved five billion dollars, and the thing he built entirely by himself turns your photos into LEGO Bengaluru
• Abhishek Chaudhary Product designer and illustrator, Chaudhary Ki Diary Abhishek Chaudhary makes software look obvious in Berlin, then goes home and makes Bollywood look strange Berlin
• Caroline Zook Artist and co-founder, Wandering Aimfully Caroline Zook built the rare creative business that didn't eat the creative Silver Coast, Portugal
• Colleen Yu Filmmaker and creator, Film With Colleen Colleen Yu films her grandmother's ICU room and a brand campaign with the same care New York
• Danielle Baskin Artist and parallel founder of 23 businesses Danielle Baskin has started 23 real businesses and refuses to shut any of them down San Francisco
• Kat Espinosa Designer and founder, Moonfrank Kat Espinosa took her design taste out of the client-services grinder and gave it a name of its own Manila
• Lois van Baarle Digital artist, Loish Lois van Baarle drew on the internet until three million people showed up to watch The Netherlands
• Nadieh Bremer Data visualization artist, Visual Cinnamon Nadieh Bremer went from mapping stars to making data look like something you'd hang on a wall The Netherlands
• Sally Huang Product designer and founder, Saltee Sally Huang started in art, detoured through software, and came back holding a vending machine New York
• Shirley Wu Independent data visualization engineer Shirley Wu visualized every line of Hamilton and made the internet care about data art San Francisco
• Susie Lu Data visualization engineer, Netflix Susie Lu is a painter who engineers charts so good you forget charts are usually bad Seattle
• Mackenzie Child Design engineer who ships the pixels and the pull request Mackenzie Child is the rare person who can sell you the vision on Monday and push the frontend on Tuesday Atlanta
• Jeff Li Design engineer turned builder-in-public Jeff Li did not want to be a creator. He posted every day anyway, and the posting became the business model Toronto