The Balancing Act Behind Every Illustration
Art direction rarely gets the spotlight it deserves. It’s the discipline that shapes how a brand’s visual identity comes to life, often walking a tightrope between a company’s personality and an individual artist’s voice. Maria Chimishkyan and Jefferson Cheng, brand designers and art directors on Figma’s Brand Studio team, know this tension well. They’ve helped steer significant parts of Figma’s visual language, including the Config event identity and a broader brand refresh, while also directing the illustrations that appear across the company’s blog.
Because art direction is a communication-based practice, the two sat down to talk through how their creative process actually works, from drilling into their own craft to casting the right illustrator for a piece.
Training the Eye and Finding the Groove
For Chimishkyan, craft in her own illustration work comes from repetition. The goal is to reach a point where technique fades into the background, leaving total freedom to experiment with tools and materials. She compares it to a ballet dancer who practices a routine until their body takes over on stage.
Cheng applies that same thinking to art direction, but with a different focus. For him, the craft is in training your eye—the constant process of editing and filtering what you see in the world and deciding what resonates. Beyond that visual curation, there is also a craft to communication, to knowing how to spark the right beginning of a project and then seeing it through collaboratively.
Casting the Right Illustrator
Cheng compares finding the right artist to a casting director choosing actors for a movie. He looks for illustrators with a strong sense of their own style who can also deliver a message in an unexpected way. Sometimes that means hiring someone whose process is inherently unpredictable, like that of artist Jon Han, who was commissioned for an article on the Atlassian method. Han’s range of techniques makes the journey from pencil sketch to final piece ambiguous, but the results are always rich and captivating. As long as the initial concept is solid, Cheng has full confidence in letting the artist execute.
Once that selection is made, Chimishkyan emphasizes trust. Constant meddling in a collaborator’s work often makes the result less interesting. The best pieces come from someone personally invested in what they’re creating. What’s more exciting is finding an illustrator with a distinct working style who hasn’t yet attempted the type of work being asked of them. The ask becomes a leap into new constraints, leading to an outcome that’s unexpected for both the artist and the art director. There’s a bit of drama to that experiment.
Cheng echoes that tension, especially when commissioning visuals for dense, technical engineering articles. The approach isn’t always to seek out a technical illustrator, but to ask how a narrative-driven artist might interpret the material. Chimishkyan adds that these topics often lead to surprising twists. The process usually distills a complex concept into a succinct metaphor, then decides whether to present it literally or abstractly. Often, an abstract route leaves the work more open. After posing the initial question, the art directors let the visual bloom and surprise them.
A favorite example for Cheng was an illustration by Hoi Chan for a piece on how engineers give feedback through “eng crits.” The article leaned on a gardening metaphor, and Chan’s dreamy, beautiful rendering of botanical life transcended the premise entirely. Chimishkyan recalls another commission for a recap of Config talks, where artist Haik Avanian built claymation-esque models. Among the many memorable visuals was an unforgettable, hyperbolic heirloom tomato—impossible to ignore.
Empathy From the Other Side of the Brief
Both designers are also working illustrators themselves, which informs their directing style. Having been on the receiving end of a brief, Cheng understands expectations more deeply and recognizes that creativity is a mysterious process. That background builds empathy for how long it takes to create something good.
For Chimishkyan, that shared experience allows for more realistic feedback and a deeper sense of trust. Over time, she has evolved from trying to control the outcome to letting collaborators guide the project toward a more interesting place. Cheng admits he, too, used to visualize the exact end result from the start—something he’s since let go of. Now, he prefers to trust the illustrator and enjoy the ride.
