Carolina Fernández Noriega was doodling in class when she made the character that would eventually become her life's work. She drew a tiny, cute fish and gave him the attitude of someone who had something to prove. She didn't have a name for him yet, but she knew the juxtaposition was funny, so she kept drawing him.

By the time she graduated from Parsons, where she studied illustration, the character had a name, a thesis built around him, and a set of prototypes she'd spent a year refining. Carolina had spent four years deliberately taking classes in graphic design, product design, typography, and creative entrepreneurship because she knew exactly what she was building and which skills she would need. The character is called Pez. It means fish.

What she's building around him is harder to place in a single category. The work pulls from ancient Taino and Aztec artifacts and from a childhood in San Juan she left at eleven, and she's been thinking about how those two things connect for most of her life. She labels herself a collectible designer. The first collection drops by the end of this summer.

Tell me a little bit about who you are.

I've been labeling myself as a collectible designer lately, but the broadest term is an artist. With collectible design, I do art toys, but I also do fine art. So it's things and pieces that people would want to collect and value, and it goes from sculptural to lighting to screen print and canvases as well. My artist statement is that I am looking to bridge both of my cultures, because I'm Puerto Rican and Mexican. So I'm always finding similarities between both, and also differences, and exploring that. Lately I've been really interested in ancient and indigenous work and art artifacts from both cultures. In Mexico you have the Mayan and Aztec and a bunch more, and in Puerto Rico you also have the Taino. In both cultures there's stonework and a lot of clay work and a lot of artifacts that remain after many many years, and it's something that I love, how it's carried down and how it's physical. So I find ways to bring in either the texture or the material or the composition from those different areas and merge it with something contemporary. It can be more urban, or it can be graffiti, or it can be a reggaeton beat or something vibrant, combining both worlds. Combining modern Latino art with ancient Latino art in a fun, collectible way is the easiest way to put it.

How would you describe your work in your own words?

Very vibrant, bold, and kind of fun.

In your bio it says that you make art toys. Can you describe what art toys are and why you wanted to combine fine arts with collectibles?

Art toys are essentially just toys that are seen more as sculptural pieces and works of fine art rather than just a figurine. I think if you get any figurine and call it an art toy, it can be an art toy, but sometimes it's the process in which it's made that makes it more high-end. So instead of just plastic, it can be a higher-end plastic so it weighs more, and then the packaging is very high-end and refined. It sells at a much higher price point and it's seen more as a collector's item. That's the distinction between an art toy and a regular figurine. As for why I wanted to make it an art toy, since my background was in fine art, the goal is to always be in a position where I can safely sustain myself out of my work. Fine art is something that moves a lot of money in this world, especially in New York City, so it is something very desirable to want to be a part of. I also feel like there's a lack of representation of women, and Latino women especially, in the streetwear area, which art toys kind of operate under. A lot of the top art toys are mainly owned by men, and if they're men, they're either white or Asian. Recently Slan has been coming up, who is of Nigerian descent and London based, and he's been getting a lot of attention, but that's like the first Black person in that space and there's not much representation. So I was like, I guess I'll be the Latino representation, and a woman at that. I do know that a lot of my audience is male-based, but I always want to empower other women and show that we can also operate in a very high-end, high-skill way and have a lot of influence in culture and media.

Sam Hox's clients see three pitches. They never see the ten or twenty that came before them. By the time a mood board lands in front of a client, Sam has already done real design work inside it: quick logo concepts, color explorations, actual type choices. What the client sees as a starting point is, for him, already a refined edit of a much longer process.

He's based in Pristina, Kosovo, founder of Second Date, and has been working in brand design since he was thirteen. His practice sits at the intersection of branding, motion design, 3D, and web, and he'll tell you directly that branding is the field he chose specifically because it doesn't limit him to any one of those things. Science and healthcare companies make up most of his client work right now, not because he set out to specialize, but because those are the briefs that give him the most freedom to push what a brand can look and feel like.

What makes his process worth understanding is the discipline underneath the breadth. He won't share a skill until he's spent months or years developing it privately first. His 3D work existed long before it appeared in his portfolio. Everything he puts out has already been through a longer, invisible process. The mood boards are the most visible version of that, but the principle runs through everything he does.

Can you tell me a little bit about who you are and maybe a bit about your artist statement?

My name is Sam. I'm based in Pristina in Kosovo and I've been doing design since I was very young, around 13. I started as a hobby, but as I went along I discovered how lucky I was that design is actually what I want to do. Even though I started just playing with it, I didn't even know that in the future I could be a designer or do this long term or make a career from it.

I just enjoyed that I could do art on my computer. I used to paint in school, and then I was also a bit addicted to computers, and when both of those things came together I knew this is what I wanted to do. I'm the founder of Second Date. I got that name very early. I work in branding, but I'm more focused on building systems, not just logo design. I'm focused on building systems where motion design, digital experiences, and everything come together, because I enjoy working across different things. I don't want to work in the future only as a web designer or only as a brand designer.

My goal is to keep learning as many things as I can. Even with technology, I use it as a tool. I might even learn film in the future. I'm already touching on it a little. Usually I learn something for quite some time through personal projects, then maybe after a year or two or three, after I've developed it a bit, I start to include it in my work. I work across different disciplines, but branding is where everything can come together: animation, design, web design, 3D. It all fits inside that.

When I look back, I see I'm a bit more refined now. I don't see the difference super fast. Maybe if I look at designs from two or three years ago only then I can see it. Very small changes I would make now. Spacing, some refinements that before I didn't understand or know to make. I can spot things a bit more now.

In terms of look and feel, in branding it's always different because each client is a different exploration, a different brand. We're not like painters who have one style they stick with for their whole career. Each client for us is something new. So the look and feel always evolves. I'm just a better designer now. I can see spacing, I can see balance a bit better.

For a certain period, Nina was drawing other people's characters. Fanart moves on social media and if you're building a following from scratch, it's a reasonable trade. The problem was that it kept giving her creative blocks. The more she drew for the algorithm, the less she had to say. At some point the calculation stopped making sense, and she started building something that was entirely hers.

Puri Puri Exitium began with three moodboards, each representing a different aesthetic she loved. Characters came out of those boards: Bonbon, Eden, and Coil, each with their own visual identity and personality, their own place in a world with lore behind it. What she didn't expect was how quickly people responded. The characters gained traction before anyone knew the backstory. The visual coherence was enough on its own.

That instinct, to build something with enough internal logic that it doesn't need explaining, runs through how Nina works. She started posting in 2015, spent years developing her practice in public, and in 2023 made the decision to archive almost everything and start over. The rebrand came through Inktober, a month of daily drawings in a completely new direction. What came out of it was the work she's known for now: dense with reference, rooted in early 2000s Japanese visual culture and old comic strips, and built around characters that feel like they've existed longer than they have.

How did you first get into making art?
I’ve always been passionate since I was a kid. My mom and my sister taught me a lot and overall my family always supported my love for art.

Do you see yourself as an illustrator, a designer, or a creator?
I call myself a creative factotum or a visual artist. I find it hard to label myself because I do many different things and I’m always eager to try new ones!

When did you decide this was something you wanted to pursue seriously?
I was coming home from my office work one day and felt like I lost my direction. I wasn't doing much art back then but people surrounding me already knew what they wanted to be. I felt like I was giving up the only thing that felt mine. After a few months, I decided to quit my job and pursue illustration.

What does a typical working session look like for you?
It really depends, everyday is different and carries different tasks, sometimes I would be filming content the whole day long, sometimes I would be sketching ideas, sometimes I would be set on a single illustration and other times I’ll be rushing the delivery of some design project! But I’m happy like that!

What tools do you work with most?
I always use procreate for my Illustrations, I would like to paint more in the future.

Your work seems to mix and mash a ton of different styles. What would you say makes it feel that way?
It’s the best way to create something unique, the more ingredients you use the more complex the taste will be. I love when people get my hidden references and easter eggs!

How would you describe your visual aesthetic to someone who's never seen your work?
I would say old comic strips combining with Japanese 2000’s culture.

Do you take inspiration from things outside of illustration/design? If so, what's a memorable example?
I constantly take pictures everywhere I go and often use them as references, I really like to observe architecture and nature.

Is there a specific era, medium, or visual world you keep returning to when you're looking for references?I really love 2000’s magazines, advertising, fashion, photography, and tech.

Alex Vargas's worlds are low poly. The characters move with a deliberate choppiness, nothing is reaching for realism, and yet something in them is deeply habitable. There's warmth in the light and a quiet humor running underneath it, and the combination produces the feeling that these places exist somewhere, that you've spent time in them before. His animations feel like playing Animal Crossing on a warm summer morning.

That feeling is built from the palette outward. Before a scene has geometry, before characters are in it, Vargas blocks in the world with rough shapes and puts the lighting in first. The orange he keeps returning to, the temperature of an afternoon through a window, all of it gets locked in before anything else is built. The warmth isn't a quality of the finished work. It's the first decision.

What makes it work is partly how much he's figured out how to do without. His style forgives choppy frames, limited movement, environments that are full of small objects rather than detailed ones. His computer was never powerful enough to do it any other way, and somewhere in there he found that the constraint was the point. Characters who feel real inside a world that makes no claim to realism. A place you want to be that couldn't actually exist.

I saw your first YouTube video posted back in 2022 called Rakook, and the description says you started animating in Blender that year. What pulled you to animating then, and what were you making before?

I never intended to be an animator going into college. I was on a path of architecture and also interactive art, like video game slash museum exhibit kind of stuff. I had a class called Immersive Experiences, which was literally making interactive art in Unity. To do that you use 3D models, so we got a little bit into Blender in that class. I was really bad at it obviously, but at the end of the class I had made a project that I really liked and I wanted to continue with it over the summer. I decided I wanted it to look prettier, so I decided to learn Blender. And as I was learning it, I realized that I enjoyed it a million times more than programming and trying to make games.

Rakook was kind of my first project ever and that's how I learned Blender. I had this idea of just wanting to make a raccoon cook. First I wanted to learn how to make a character, so I watched videos on that. Then I wanted him to move, so I watched a rigging tutorial. Then I wanted him to cook soup, which is liquid, so I learned how to do a liquid simulation. It was kind of an amalgamation of a lot of tutorials, and that's the best way to learn in my opinion.

You taught yourself Blender through that project. What tips would you give anyone learning Blender or getting into animation?

A lot of people want to learn those tools because they see things they like and they want to make stuff like that. And a lot of the time what I've seen happen is they'll follow one tutorial, then another tutorial, and they'll never really leave that tutorial phase. They'll always just depend on making stuff through tutorials. That's fine if you just want to pick it up casually or just learn the software, but if you only rely on tutorials, that's where people get stuck and never really progress.

If you really want to learn Blender, the best way is to have a goal. For me, I wanted to make a short film, and that's how I learned all the aspects of it. Whenever I got stuck, I'd look up a tutorial for that specific part and then keep going by myself until I got stuck again. If you have something that you want to make, that's always a better way to learn the tools. And you get rewarded because you get to make what you want to make. It's a lot more reassuring that way.

What artists inspired you to create 3D animations?

There was one artist I followed on social media who really encouraged me to get into it. Her name is Janice Lee, her tag is Janice Journal. We're actually pretty good friends now because she also lives in New York. I stumbled upon one of her videos and it was like a "my first five projects" kind of thing, and I thought they were really cute. I was like, wow, these are her first five, that means I could probably get good too, pretty quickly. She's definitely the one who got me into it.

A lot of people in your comments ask about your animation style, which has really popped off on social media. How would you describe it?

When I first started with this new style, it obviously wasn't my style in the beginning. But I've always liked low poly, video game aesthetics since I grew up with video games. When I first started I wanted to imitate that, so I wanted to do something like PS1, low poly, pixelated, lo-fi kind of aesthetics. Then I realized I also really liked warm lighting, and when you do PS1 aesthetics, lighting isn't usually a big part of that. You typically want your characters to not react to light. So I kind of just mixed both. Now what I have is more of a DS or 3DS feel, I think it's probably closer to those systems. But at the end of the day, if somebody calls my style low poly or PS1 or game-like graphics, I would never correct that because that's pretty much what I was going for.

Your aesthetic pulls a lot from Animal Crossing and that GameCube era of Nintendo games. What does that style do for you that more stylized or newer CG can't?

I've always loved the amount of personality those games have. One specific reference is Mega Man Legends, a PS1 game that I think looks incredible. It was the first piece of media where I noticed that instead of using bones to move the characters' mouths and eyes, they would just replace all of that with PNGs. Whenever they wanted the character to blink, they'd just put a blink PNG instead of actually moving and closing the eye. I just think that limitation and the amount of personality they were able to create with that was really charming. And honestly, part of it was that my computer was really weak and that approach is a lot easier for it to handle. But I always just thought it was cute. Limitation breeds something really beautiful, you know.