Talia Cotton
Talia Cotton is a designer, technologist, entrepreneur, educator, and public speaker who is the founder and creative director of Cotton. She is a globally recognized leading expert in the intersection of branding and technology. Her work uses computation as a strategic and expressive tool to express brand values, systems, and narratives—often translating complex data, behaviors, or sound into expressive visual languages.
Early Life and Personal Background
Cotton was raised in New York in an Iraqi-Jewish household. Her parents were musicians, creating an incredibly creative environment that shaped her early interests. From a young age, she demonstrated a passion for both the arts and sciences, loving math and creativity equally. In high school, she studied under math teacher Alon Krausz, whom she credits with cultivating her love for mathematics—a foundation that would later prove essential to her work in computational design.
Despite her affinity for mathematics, Cotton's path to coding was not immediate or straightforward. When she began studying communication design at Parsons School of Design, she was required to take a coding class in her first semester. Initially, she was skeptical, thinking "this isn't going to be for me, I'm just going take it and pass and move on." She noticed that of the 15 sections of the class, only one teacher was a woman, and as a result, many of her female classmates simply couldn't envision themselves doing the same thing. However, once she began the course, Cotton immediately fell in love with the creative possibilities of code and spent the rest of her time at Parsons honing her design and coding skills side-by-side.
Career
Founded in 2023, Cotton is a creative agency in New York City pursuing purposeful design work with code. At Cotton, Talia leads a multidisciplinary team working across brand identity, digital experiences, custom tools, and experimental systems, guided by a research-driven process that balances intellectual depth with visual impact.
Prior to founding Cotton, Talia led projects on two teams at the notable design firm Pentagram, focusing on the design and development of data-driven and algorithmic brand identities and websites. During this time, she worked closely with Michael Bierut and Giorgia Lupi. Before Pentagram, she led digital brand design and development at Champions Design (formerly known as The Original Champions of Design). Her diverse client portfolio includes prestigious organizations such as The New York Times, MIT Media Lab, Google Arts & Culture, Verizon, Carnegie Hall, the MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab, Emerson Collective, the 92nd Street Y, Nike, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Notable projects include the algorithmic logo design for Guilty by Association and Plastic Air for Google Arts and Culture.
Guilty by Association and Design Bias
The Guilty by Association project sparked significant conversation in the design community about the philosophical implications of technology as a design tool and the question of whether truly unbiased design is possible. Created for an arts organization championing underrepresented artists, Cotton attempted to create an unbiased logo by using algorithms to generate limitless permutations, but this raised thorny questions about whether design can ever really be neutral.
As Cotton herself acknowledged in the project, "At the end of the day, I was the one who drew this. I was trying to stretch it as far as I could, but ultimately I decided the initial stencil from which all of these [permutations] are being written." This realization—that even when controlling for many factors, a designer's viewpoint is inherently at the heart of their work—became a central thesis of the project's significance.
The project was widely covered in design publications. Fast Company explored how bias exists everywhere in design, from Eurocentric standards of what constitutes "good design" to prejudiced code hiding beneath a website's surface. It's Nice That noted that the identity allows GBA to tackle the "laundry list of factors" contributing to a designer's bias—backgrounds, cultures, educations, and the tools they use.
What distinguished Cotton's approach was her technical innovation in making algorithmic design appear human. Where computer-drawn design tends to look blocky, wonky, or overly detailed, the GBA logo overcame "blockiness" by using Bézier curves and a mathematical, manual process to properly translate letterforms into an algorithm. LogoLounge reported that Cotton developed a "version 2.0" of the logo generator, inviting other artists to draw the initial letters while she applies her algorithmic logic—an attempt to further reduce individual bias in the system.
The project's lasting impact lies in its honest interrogation of design's limitations. As The Brand Identity observed, the identity is literally taken out of the biased designer's hands and can honestly and infinitely represent another person, serving as a metaphor for each undiscovered, underrepresented artist.
Education and Teaching
Talia attended Carnegie Mellon University for business and psychology, and graduated with honors from Parsons School of Design, where she began her study of applied programming simultaneously with design.
She teaches introductory and advanced coding classes at Parsons School of Design and Harvard Graduate School of Design. At Parsons, she teaches Core Interaction, where she helps cultivate the next generation of designers who code. At Harvard, she co-instructs "Moot Court Design Fiction: Rendering Ames Real," a J-Term course exploring how generative AI can be used to stage scenarios around complex legal and design concerns. In 2019, she founded "Intro to Coding for Designers," a workshop held at index.space catered to boost the advancement of the study of code-as-design for the design community. Her commitment to education stems from a belief that code should be understood as a design medium rather than a mysterious technical skill.
Recognition and Speaking
Talia's contributions to the design field have earned significant recognition. She was named a "Responsible Designer to Watch" by GDUSA and received the Young Guns Award, which recognizes creative professionals under the age of 30 who are shaping the future of the advertising and communications industries. Additionally, in 2022, she was nominated for the Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards as an Emerging Designer. Her work has been recognized by The One Club, Type Directors Club, and featured in publications including Fast Company and It's Nice That.
A sought-after speaker at design and technology conferences worldwide, Talia explores themes of algorithmic authorship, craft in the age of automation, and the evolving role of designers as system builders. Fast Company described her as "one of the leading graphic designers of the moment to embrace the possibilities of code." She has inspired audiences at international venues including the Google Visual Design Summit, OFFF Barcelona, Latin America Design Fest in Peru, Future London Academy, KIKK Festival in Belgium, RGD DesignThinkers, and Instrument's internal conference. In 2025, she delivered keynote addresses at the International Assembly Festival in Glasgow, Scotland, and Typographics 2025 at Cooper Union in New York City, where her talk "Taming Chaos"examined how creative technologies challenge traditional notions of control in design.
Her speaking experience spans diverse audiences, from students to CEOs, from design professionals to non-designers, in venues ranging from intimate rooms of a dozen to halls of a thousand people. Notable early career recognition came from her participation as a contestant at AIGA's Command X competition at their annual Design Conference, where her presentation caught the attention of Michael Bierut, ultimately leading to her position at Pentagram.
Philosophy and Approach
What distinguishes Talia's approach is her ability to create work that is not only visually compelling but strategically grounded and technologically sophisticated. Her design philosophy is rooted in the belief that code should be used as a strategic tool to address meaningful design problems, rather than merely as a method to achieve aesthetics or automation. As she states, "My work is driven by code—less as a method to attain an aesthetic or increase the visual capabilities of the design, but rather as a method to truthfully provide design solutions to the deeper problems that companies face."
Cotton firmly believes that when design is driven by code, it can tap into technologies that are uniquely suited to address contemporary design challenges—such as creating designs that are transparent, unbiased, representative, and community-driven. Her approach rejects the notion that code should be used simply because it "looks cool," instead advocating that designers should not do something just because it's easy with code, but should come up with really smart ideas, even if that means using just one thoughtful line of code that makes conceptual sense.
Central to her philosophy is the concept of "Good design" that truthfully and effectively represents the themes and values of its subject. She loathes trends, viewing them as "inherently anti-design" because they distract from creating something truly authentic to a brand's unique identity. In her branding work, she emphasizes that like a human, a brand's identity is unique, requiring a deep dive into what drives it, its values and ambitions, origins and current perceptions.
Cotton also advocates for designers to avoid relying on visual inspiration from other designers' work, believing that true creativity comes from the subject itself. She finds her most creative moments come after putting sustained focus on a problem, allowing thoughts to continue flowing even when stepping away from the work.
In founding Cotton, she was motivated by the recognition that young designers had a prevalent interest in coding with virtually no outlets to pursue it. She felt uniquely positioned to provide opportunities and believed "the design world needed a home for this new medium." Her stated mission is to explore new design possibilities through code "both in form and function, but more importantly, in meaning and impact," and to be a resource for creative teams curious about what's possible with computational design.
Through her agency, teaching, and speaking engagements, Talia Cotton continues to shape the evolving landscape where creativity and technology converge, committed to educating the design community on what's possible with code and inspiring designers to pursue it fearlessly and passionately.