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
12 profiled so far, newest first.
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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
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Caroline Zook
Artist and co-founder, Wandering Aimfully
Caroline Zook built the rare creative business that didn't eat the creative
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Colleen Yu
Filmmaker and creator, Film With Colleen
Colleen Yu films her grandmother's ICU room and a brand campaign with the same care
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Danielle Baskin
Artist and parallel founder of 23 businesses
Danielle Baskin has started 23 real businesses and refuses to shut any of them down
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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
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Lois van Baarle
Digital artist, Loish
Lois van Baarle drew on the internet until three million people showed up to watch
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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
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Sally Huang
Product designer and founder, Saltee
Sally Huang started in art, detoured through software, and came back holding a vending machine
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Shirley Wu
Independent data visualization engineer
Shirley Wu visualized every line of Hamilton and made the internet care about data art
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Susie Lu
Data visualization engineer, Netflix
Susie Lu is a painter who engineers charts so good you forget charts are usually bad
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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
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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
Common questions
- Which designers and artists are profiled on Cool People Stories?
- Cool People Stories profiles 12 designers and artists, including Abhishek Chaudhary, Caroline Zook, Colleen Yu, Danielle Baskin, Kat Espinosa, Lois van Baarle, Nadieh Bremer, Sally Huang, and 4 more. Each one has a full profile covering their story, what they have shipped, and links to their own sites.
- What counts as a designer or artist on Cool People Stories?
- Someone whose output is visual and whose taste is the actual product: illustration, product design, film, data visualization. Some design for clients and some only for themselves, and the ones with clients almost all have a second body of work that is theirs alone.
- How are people chosen for Cool People Stories?
- There is no submission form and no sponsorship. Everyone is picked because they were interesting enough to write about, and the profiles are researched and verified before they go up.
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