Design Spotlight
Fresh Grad 2026

You “Min” Choi is a NYC-based graphic designer made in South Korea, designed in the United States. Witty, legible, and confidently human, her work rewards attention—designed not just to be viewed, but to be understood and remembered.

An illustrator-turned-product designer who finds playing with technology to be as warm and intuitive as sketching in a notebook. Having just completed my Masters in Communication Design at Parsons, I now aim to replicate this feeling for my users in future digital experiences. In short, I create projects that are inviting, friendly, and, most of all, empathetic.

Yura Kang is a graphic designer and illustrator working across identity systems, publications, and experiential design. Her practice connects cultures, contexts, and lived experience, shaped by the cities she has called home. Working across books, websites, moving image, illustration, and objects, she creates research-driven work that explores belonging, translation, and connection. Yura holds an MFA from Pratt Institute and an MA in Illustration from Kingston University.

Olivia Kasmin is a Brooklyn-based data visualization engineer, designer, and recent graduate of Parsons School of Design’s MS Data Visualization program. Her cross-disciplinary work sits at the intersection of culture, technology, and storytelling, where she leverages her background in both software engineering and art history. She has worked at Netflix and Atlassian as an engineer, and previously at Sotheby’s and Phillips as a cataloguer.

Atisha is an interaction designer with an engineer’s instinct for systems and a designer’s sensitivity to human behavior. Her work spans SaaS, creative AI tooling, and agritech, with products reaching millions of users globally and work presented at the UN General Assembly in 2023. Lately, she has been thinking about how wearable technologies and intelligent systems can shift healthcare from reactive intervention toward more continuous, contextual, and preventative care.

Wilna “Winnie” Michel is an Art Director and Master’s candidate in Branding and Integrated Communications (BIC) at CCNY. Her work lives in the duality between two identities: “Wilna,” the strategic brand-obsessed introvert thinker, and “Winnie,” the loud creative, with her finger on the pulse of all things social and trendy.

Marshall Montner is an art director and recent graduate of CCNY’s Branding + Integrated Communications MPS program. New Mexico-born, New England-educated, and New York-based, his work lives in the in-between — where places, categories, and ideas that “shouldn’t” work together somehow do. Outside of ads, he writes about interiors for mydesignport.com. His first creative director was his Bubbie, now 108, who helped him paint an alligator at five.

TASH NIKOL is a writer, editor, and book artist from the South and the founder of Grace Issues Press. Their work engages archives, materiality, and the environment through craft and community, centering Black and Indigenous histories and practices of survival, earth-keeping, and healing.

Alanna Okun is a writer, artist, and game designer. A recent graduate of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), her work concerns the connections between craft, creativity, and computation. She is the author of two books, The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater: Essays on Crafting (Macmillan 2018) and Knit a Hat: A Beginner’s Guide to Knitting (Abrams 2020).

From Kansas City to Seattle to New York, Ashford has spent the last decade helping brands, large and small, navigate identity crises through thoughtful, empathetic, strategy-backed concepts and a maddening pursuit of perfection. Now he’s chasing a master’s degree in branding to deepen that practice and push it even further.

Shing-Hay Wong is a production/graphic designer based in Brooklyn, NY. Starting his design career in architecture in Beijing and New York, he later discovered a love for editorial design and type design. He enrolled in the Graduate Communication Design program at Pratt Institute and Type@Cooper of Cooper Union. He also serves as a TA for the following classes.