City Design Tour: New York City

What makes your city’s design scene special?

The short answer is density, not only of people, but of disciplines. New York is home to 10 of the nation’s top design and architecture schools and has the highest concentration of architects and designers per capita among world cities. What that creates, in practice, is a scene where graphic designers, product designers, architects, art directors, brand strategists and a myriad of other creatives are constantly in proximity—sharing studio buildings, attending the same openings, crossing paths at the same talks. Disciplinary cross-pollination is less a philosophy here than a simple fact of geography, and design, for the most part, is taken seriously. Making it a refreshing environment to live and practice in.

That energy gets organized and amplified every May through NYCxDESIGN, the city’s annual design festival. Founded in 2012, it has grown into an internationally recognized, citywide celebration of design spanning trade shows, exhibitions, public installations and a rich program of talks that draws participants from the global design community. What’s notable about the festival is that it genuinely reaches across neighbourhoods: Chelsea, SoHo, Dumbo, Williamsburg, Harlem and Long Island City. New York becomes a kind of distributed design campus for a week.

I work in Chelsea, which specifically puts me at the centre of something unusual. Once a district of warehouses and meatpacking operations, it has become the world’s leading hub for contemporary art and a showcase for signature architecture. There are currently an estimated 350 galleries in Chelsea alone, and the creative density you feel just walking the blocks between 18th and 27th Streets is genuinely hard to replicate anywhere else.

Is there a place/landmark in your city that helps inspire you as a designer?

There are two that I keep returning to. For me, the High Line does something particular that I haven’t found in any other urban space. It’s not a museum, it’s not a park in the conventional sense, it’s an infrastructure project that became one of the most compelling pieces of public design in the world. Walking its length, you’re moving through an editorial sequence: landscape, architecture, public art and the city itself, framed and reframed at every turn. The buildings that have grown around it—Zaha Hadid’s 520 West 28th, Frank Gehry’s IAC Building, Thomas Heatherwick’s Lantern House—constitute an impromptu architecture gallery. Walking through Chelsea feels like moving through a live exhibition of design.

The second is Grand Central Station. I pass through it every day on my commute to work, and it still impresses me to this day. If I ever want to people-watch, I’ll grab a coffee and sit in the station. There is always something interesting happening within its walls and something interesting to look at.

There’s also the MET Cloisters, the New York Botanical Gardens and Central Park. Countless bookstores, creative spaces and block gardens. I find myself typically drawn to the spaces that combine nature with architecture, history and culture. That’s likely due to my roots of growing up in nature. Being in a city like New York, the concrete jungle that never sleeps, it can, at times, feel incredibly disorientating and overwhelming.

For a designer working in branding and visual identity, spaces like this matter because they remind you what design feels like when it operates at the scale of lived experience, when it’s not a deliverable, but a place people inhabit. That’s a useful corrective on days when the work feels small.

Is there a design project that stands out for you as emblematic of the local design scene?

If I had to point to a single project that captures New York’s relationship with design, it would be the MTA subway map, specifically its most recent reinvention. In April 2025, the MTA unveiled the first full redesign of the subway map since 1979—a visually bold, user-centric design that makes it easier for people to understand where they’re going. The new map returns to the modernist principles pioneered by Massimo Vignelli in his 1972 NYC Subway Map design, which itself is included in the Institute of Design’s list of the “100 Great Designs of Modern Times.”

What makes this project emblematic of New York design is the full arc of its story: an original piece of graphic design so rigorous it was controversial; a decades-long debate about function versus aesthetics; and ultimately a resolution that honours both. The MTA sees the new map as a mix of Vignelli’s minimalist simplicity and a more geographically accurate approach that helps people navigate the system more easily. It is public-interest design at the city scale, and it lands differently when you’re the person on the platform trying to catch the right train from major hubs like Times Square.

What do you wish your city had that designers would really benefit from?

Affordable, flexible studio space that doesn’t require you to be a 20-person agency to access it. New York is extraordinarily good at convening people, but the economics of real estate mean that independent designers and small studios are constantly navigating unpredictability. A network of subsidized co-working and studio facilities specifically for designers, not generic WeWork-style offices, but spaces with the infrastructure that creative work actually requires, would be genuinely transformative. Some cities have built this. New York, with all its design institutions and civic ambition, should be leading the way.

Are there any challenges that designers in the city face?

The cost of living is the obvious one, and it shapes everything downstream: who can afford to stay here, who can afford to take risks, which studios can hold on to emerging talent. Income varies widely in New York’s design sector—from $36,420 to over $100,450 annually—depending on experience, specialization, region and freelancers often face significant pricing pressure in a competitive marketplace.

Beyond economics, there’s a subtler challenge: visibility. New York has so much going on that excellent work can get lost in the mix. A show, a launch, a new studio, the city’s appetite for what’s next means the past disappears quickly. Building a sustained reputation here requires not just good work but also strategic presence, which can feel exhausting, particularly for designers who would rather be designing, not promoting.

None of this diminishes what the city is, though. New York remains a place where ambition and craft are taken seriously in the same breath and where the streets, the institutions and the culture conspire to make the work better. That is a rare and valuable thing.