Need more colour in your life? When it comes to using colour in our work, it's easy to play safe.This month, we feature Dannii Pollen's phenomenal collage work, Qi Ren's nostalgic illustration, toka assal's storytelling and Emily Soley's architectural reflections. All amazing creatives, all walking their own path, and telling their own story.
In TDK world you'll find our regular monthly #TDKtuesdays meetups happening in several cities. Check if there is one near you!
βTDK Studio is live, helping you grow your practice and confidence with Creative Insider talks, Thought Bubble conversations and Studio Briefs, as well as Mentor Mondays!
Our annual awards open August 1. Join the waitlist for early access and a few early bonuses!
We're also on the look out for brands, design schools or studios who are interested in partnering with us to support our global creative community. If you're interested, get in touch!
Based in Portugal, Danii now works as an illustrator with a practice built on bold colour, intuitive mark-making, and paper cut collage.
What shapes Danii's approach isn't a methodology, it's is a refusal to chase trends, to bend toward approval, to optimise for algorithms. Her process is almost entirely intuitive: brush strokes and marker and collage finding direction as they go. The result is a visual language that's unmistakably hers
Qi Ren grew up in China drawing faces inside circles traced from bottle caps. After studying design, her transition to illustrator happened the way most real ones do: through accumulated work, consistent sharing, and slowly realising that drawing was the one thing she kept returning to no matter what else was happening in her life. Now based in Japan, Qi's work is a direct expression of where she lives.
Based in Alexandria, Toka builds her work from the ground up β starting with deep research, then allowing intuition and visual storytelling to shape the outcome. Her practice is rooted in Egyptian and Arab visual culture: Fatimid and Mamluk architecture, folk art, traditional crafts, the street visuals of everyday life.
Emily Soley should have started a linear architecture career. Instead, she took a detour (or many small detours) to find a space that sits at the intersection of illustration, architecture and memory.
Artboard Studio gives you thousands of high-quality mockups for case studies, portfolio projects, and client presentations. Devices, apparel, packaging, print, and branding, every category is covered.
In Jan this year, Mozilla Foundation launched Imagine Intel: Creative Purpose at the Dawn of AI, a new zine capturing the hopes, anxieties, and demands of creatives working at a transformational moment for creativity and technology.
β Volume 01, to be published in late 2026, will feature emerging designers from around the world, exclusive interviews, guides to our favourite TDK cities, a spotlight on our city hosts and more! β
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