design
(50)
Levi Brooks and the art of getting through
A fax machine, a museum website, a studio started after graduation. Levi Brooks has spent twenty years finding ways for people to reach the thing on the other side of the screen.
Richard Moross and the curious survival of the business card
Richard Moross built MOO by giving an ordinary business card a little personality. Getting there meant abandoning a dreadful name, listening to people who disagreed with him, and learning which ideas deserved to survive.
Gordon Segal and the things worth unpacking
A few European dishes, $17,000 and an old Chicago elevator factory gave Gordon and Carole Segal a place to begin. Crate & Barrel grew from their belief that everyday objects deserved a better introduction.
Zain Mustafa Went Home. The Classroom Got Bigger.
After a career across New York, Dubai and Karachi, Zain Mustafa began taking people into Pakistan’s architectural past. His work now follows the knowledge that survives in buildings, boats and the people who know how to make them.
CreativeMornings runs on coffee. And people.
A free breakfast talk became a global creative network. The clever part is how CreativeMornings makes strangers feel they have a reason to come back.
Better business starts with better listening
The Entrepreneurs turns Monocle’s curiosity about the world into a weekly business habit. Its most useful lesson may come from a company nothing like yours.
Tiffany Rafii and the Business of Going First
She started UpSpring with a childhood friend in the uncertain spring of 2009. Seventeen years later, Tiffany Rafii is still asking what a business could become - and who needs room to grow with it.
Touch of Modern sells the pleasure of not knowing what you want
A tiny television, a better-looking tool, a watch you never meant to buy. Touch of Modern turned browsing into a business - and learned that delight still has to survive delivery.
The Agency That Learned to Sell Attention Twice
MARTIN* made a state slogan immortal, gave insurance a gecko, and made Snoop Dogg quitting smoke into national news. Its harder trick was learning that attention only matters when the business underneath can cash it.
Lore would like a word with your buzzwords
A PR consultancy made a font that crosses out jargon. The joke explains its serious business: helping people with something to say become worth listening to.
Taylor & Company knows a building has more than one story
A desert house. A hospital. A leadership handover. Julie D. Taylor’s PR firm finds the different stories inside each, then gives editors a reason to care.
DEPARTURE and the work behind the pretty website
A museum with a troublesome back end. A biotech company with a soundtrack. Inside the San Diego agency that treats branding as something you have to build.
KUYA Gives Brands a Personality That Travels
From a neighborhood internet mascot to Floyd Mayweather’s supplement tubs, KUYA turns a brand’s point of view into things people can actually see. Its own identity began with a more personal assignment: starting over.
AIGA San Francisco Gets Designers Into the Room
A portfolio can show what you know. AIGA San Francisco helps you meet the people who can challenge it - through critiques, studio visits, mentoring and a design community built over four decades.
The Portland Agency Named After a Fish That Swims Upstream on Purpose
For nearly three decades, Sockeye has sold its clients on a strange idea: that the safest thing a brand can do is refuse to be boring. Here is how a 57-person shop in Oregon turned a point of view into a business.
The Ad Agency That Sold Rebellion - Then Refused to Sell Itself
Wieden+Kennedy taught Nike to say three words and built a global business around protecting the conditions that made them possible. Four decades later, independence remains both its sales pitch and its hardest assignment.
Phillips
Phillips has spent 230 years learning how to make a room want something. Its modern trick is turning that theater into a focused global marketplace for art, design, watches and jewels - without trying to sell everything else.
Q4 Designs LLC
Q4 Designs LLC is a New York-based apparel company that designs, sources, produces and manages branded outerwear and sportswear on behalf of well-known brand partners. Founded in 2011 by Harry Tawil and built on more than five decades of combined industry experience, Q4 handles the full product life cycle - design, sourcing and production, planning and sales, and operations - across four Centers of Excellence. Its licensed portfolio spans brands including DKNY, Reebok, Jessica Simpson, Steve Madden, Free Country, Bebe, Canada Weathergear, Snozu and Spyder, covering men's, women's and children's outerwear, sportswear, swimwear and accessories.
Eunice Byun
Eunice Byun is the co-founder and CEO of Material, the New York-based direct-to-consumer kitchenware brand she launched in 2018 with Dave Nguyen. A Goldman Sachs alum who spent a decade in finance and beauty before leaving a VP role at Revlon, she grew up in her family's Korean restaurant in San Diego and built Material around the belief that the everyday kitchen deserves fewer, better, more beautiful tools. Under her leadership Material has grown through word-of-mouth loyalty, landed in Nordstrom nationwide, and donated nearly $200,000 to community food causes through its Kinder Kitchens campaign.
James Hirschfeld
James Hirschfeld is the co-founder and CEO of Paperless Post, the New York company that turned the dread of sending an invitation into an act of design. He started it from a Harvard dorm in 2008 with his older sister Alexa, after his own 21st birthday party left him stuck between expensive paper and lifeless email. More than 175 million people have since sent or received a Paperless Post, across roughly 20 million events. He runs it as a design company that happens to live in a browser.
Adam Morgan
Adam Morgan is VP of Brand at Twilio, where he led the company's 'Be a Builder' brand refresh in 2024 - repositioning Twilio from a developer platform to a movement for all builders. With 29 years in creativity, strategy, and storytelling, he previously served as Executive Creative Director at Adobe for 8.5 years and Senior Director of Brand + Creative at Splunk/Cisco. He is the author of 'Sorry Spock, Emotions Drive Business' (Morgan James Publishing), host of the Real Creative Leadership podcast, and was named to AdWeek's Creative 100 in 2020. He holds a Master's in Marketing Strategy from Northwestern University and lives in Lehi, Utah.
Jonathan Johnsongriffin
Jonathan Johnsongriffin is VP of Global Brand & Creative at Google, where he leads the Global Brand Studio's creative strategy. A veteran of Nike's most iconic campaigns - including 'You Can't Stop Us' and 'Just Do It Crazy Dreams' - he spent nearly five years shaping Nike's global brand narrative before joining Google in January 2023. Co-founder of the Serena Williams Design Crew program, jury member at Cannes Lions 2023 and 2024, and board trustee at Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, Johnsongriffin blends industrial design roots with cultural storytelling at the intersection of sport, technology, and purpose.
Patricia Smith
Patricia Smith is listed as a Group Chief Executive Officer associated with Smith, the Asbury Park hospitality collective behind Porta, Pascal & Sabine, Homesick, and Lovesick. Her public footprint is thin; her affiliation places her inside one of New Jersey's most recognizable restaurant groups, an operation that helped re-light Asbury Park's main streets after 2006.
Domestika
Domestika is a global learning platform for creatives - illustrators, designers, photographers, animators, writers - built around professionally produced video courses and an enormous community of working professionals. Founded in Spain in 2002 as a forum, it became a unicorn in 2022 and now hosts millions of students taking courses in more than 10 languages.
Eight Inc.
Eight Inc. is a globally recognized strategic design firm founded in 1989 by Tim Kobe. Best known for designing the original Apple Store with Steve Jobs, the firm now operates across San Francisco, New York, London, Tokyo, Singapore, Shanghai and Dubai, helping brands like Nike, Virgin Atlantic, Citibank, Dolby, McLaren, Lincoln and Nissan turn ideas into human experiences across architecture, retail, products, identity and digital.
Fellow
Fellow makes design-led gear for people who take their home coffee seriously - the gooseneck Stagg EKG kettle, the Ode and Opus grinders, vacuum-insulated travel mugs, and a roaster-rotating subscription called Fellow Drops. Founded by Jake Miller in 2013 after a Stanford d.school project, it bootstrapped its way from Kickstarter to a $30M Series B in 2022.
Maze
Maze is a user research and product testing platform that lets product teams test prototypes, run usability studies, and gather customer insights at speed. Founded in 2018 by Jonathan Widawski and Thomas Mary, it has grown into an AI-powered research platform used by more than 60,000 product teams - from startups to Atlassian, Braze and Lowe's.
Minted
Minted is a San Francisco design marketplace that turns crowdsourced art from independent artists into holiday cards, wedding invitations, wall art, and home decor printed on demand. Founded in 2007 by Mariam Naficy, the company runs continuous design competitions where its community of 15,000+ artists submit work, customers vote, and winning designs are produced and sold worldwide.
Jesse Pickard
Jesse Pickard is the Founder and CEO of The Mind Company (formerly Elevate Labs), the studio behind Elevate (Apple's App of the Year 2014), Balance (Google's App of the Year 2021), and Spark - a portfolio of science-backed mental fitness apps with over 80 million downloads. A designer-turned-entrepreneur, Pickard co-founded language learning startup MindSnacks in 2010 before pivoting to build Elevate in 2014, pioneering the consumer mental fitness category. He is also an Investing Partner at Volo Ventures.
Jake Miller
Jake Miller is the founder of Fellow, a San Francisco-based premium coffee gear company known for design-forward products like the Stagg EKG electric kettle, Ode Brew Grinder, and Carter Move Mug. He launched Fellow as a Stanford MBA class project in 2013, weathered 73 investor rejections and a failed first product, before building a nine-figure consumer brand sold in 45+ countries and backed by $42M in funding. Miller's mission is to transform everyday coffee routines into meaningful rituals by bridging the gap between specialty roasters and home baristas.