About
I’m Carly Ayres, a writer and designer whose work lives at the intersection of brand…
Activity
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Carly Ayres reposted thisCarly Ayres reposted thisDanger Testing is an example of using tech to not replace curiosity, creativity or connection but to deepen it. Huge fan of the team since Carly Ayres introduced them to AI Residency (AIR) last summer and I recently had a fun conversation with co-founder Los Mayers. If you're wondering how ephemeral apps might endure, or what the beautiful balance of being both unserious and ambitious looks like, give it a read and let me know what you think.
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Carly Ayres reposted thisCarly Ayres reposted thisWe are seeking a Design Systems Lead with extensive experience in owning design systems at large organizations. This role involves bootstrapping an intuitive semantic token system that supports design and product teams across multiple platforms and frameworks. Key qualifications include: · An impeccable eye for visual design. · Understanding of the nuanced differences between mobile, web, and React UI best practices. · Strong product sensibilities as you help inbound contributions from various product feature teams. · Familiarity with Figma, but primarily living on GH where they own their repo. · A true 50/50 design-engineer · Readiness to work with new AI tooling and comfort with ambiguity. If you meet these criteria, and you are ready to chat, we would love to hear from you. I will not have the capacity to answer all messages, so if you don't hear back that is why.
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Carly Ayres reposted thisCarly Ayres reposted this👀 i'm always on the hunt to expand our list of brand collaborators
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Carly Ayres reposted thisCarly Ayres reposted thisJust realized that one of my favorite easter eggs I made while at Stripe is still on the /jobs page… Using an experimental CSS feature that’s only available on Firefox, the monitor in the top right mirrors the website itself, so if you select any text, you can see the text selected in the monitor. Or if you scroll the page, the page on the monitor scrolls as well. 🥚💅 Super thankful that some of these little details still live on.
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Carly Ayres reposted thisCarly Ayres reposted thisI’m excited to post this job opening for a senior writer position on my team! We're looking to bring on someone who can be an anchor writer/thinker for the Design section. This is not a typical design writing role, mostly because Fast Company is unique in how we think about design. We cover the topic expansively, but not through the traditional 'capital D' design lens. Yes, we write about architecture, graphic design, fashion, marketing, and UX. But more importantly we're always trying to think about how design shapes and explains the world around us. What the business impact is. What the cultural impact is. I'd love to work with an ambitious reporter who is a sharp observer of business and culture. Bonus points if you have an interest in how design and technology are reshaping the design/tech industries, and the world more broadly. Hope you'll apply! Apply on our site: https://lnkd.in/e5de9Wsa Apply on Linkedin: https://lnkd.in/eJG5wbEU
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Carly Ayres reposted thisCarly Ayres reposted thisI’m excited to post this job opening for a senior writer position on my team! We're looking to bring on someone who can be an anchor writer/thinker for the Design section. This is not a typical design writing role, mostly because Fast Company is unique in how we think about design. We cover the topic expansively, but not through the traditional 'capital D' design lens. Yes, we write about architecture, graphic design, fashion, marketing, and UX. But more importantly we're always trying to think about how design shapes and explains the world around us. What the business impact is. What the cultural impact is. I'd love to work with an ambitious reporter who is a sharp observer of business and culture. Bonus points if you have an interest in how design and technology are reshaping the design/tech industries, and the world more broadly. Hope you'll apply! Apply on our site: https://lnkd.in/e5de9Wsa Apply on Linkedin: https://lnkd.in/eJG5wbEU
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Carly Ayres shared thisLive from maternity leave, dipping my toes back in with a recap of May in design and tech from my middle of the night scrolls: Design died in a LES storefront. The Pope declared holy war on AI. SF decided a “mere” $499k salary is the poverty line. Everlane sold to Shein. Read up, and let me know what I missed (likely a lot). https://lnkd.in/erHER4Kc
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Carly Ayres reposted thisCarly Ayres reposted thisWe're looking for 1–2 part-time faculty to join our mighty crew leading students through their BFA Communication Design thesis. We work together as a whole cohort (~150 students) to develop our students' independently-driven work across physical and digital media built on foundations in typography and interaction. Students need faculty who can build classroom culture, make beautiful things and/or interfaces, critique interactive and systems-based work, and critically guide students' use of AI. Class is in person, 9am to 3pm on Fridays. (Image below is from my thesis class a million years ago.) Please email me at cezzarj@newschool.edu if you are interested. ✨ You can see students' thesis work from 2026 (and archives going back 10+ years) here: https://bfacd.parsons.edu/
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Carly Ayres reposted thisCarly Ayres reposted thisTomorrow is the last day to take the freelance design pricing survey. If you've been thinking about doing it, but haven't, now's the time. We've gotten a lot of great responses, but statistically speaking, the more the better! This is an opportunity to bring a little more transparency to how designers get paid. Anyone who completes the survey will get the full report for free when it launches. Take the survey here: bit.ly/DesignSurvey26
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Carly Ayres reacted on thisCarly Ayres reacted on thisDanger Testing is an example of using tech to not replace curiosity, creativity or connection but to deepen it. Huge fan of the team since Carly Ayres introduced them to AI Residency (AIR) last summer and I recently had a fun conversation with co-founder Los Mayers. If you're wondering how ephemeral apps might endure, or what the beautiful balance of being both unserious and ambitious looks like, give it a read and let me know what you think.
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Carly Ayres liked thisCarly Ayres liked thisToday we launched a new fortnightly column on It's Nice That called 'In House' where we go inside the workings of major brands, agencies and companies shaping the future of the creative industry. Welcoming back our ex-Editor in Chief Rob Alderson to site is also a joy; and the perfect casting to kick off the column. Our first interviewee is the insightful Loredana Crisan from Figma hot on the heels of their annual Config conference and design community haven. So much wisdom in here and reading Loredana say “Prioritisation is always an art that we pretend is a science.” is really speaking to me this week! Keep your eyes peeled for the next one in a fortnight... Article here - https://lnkd.in/eTCk9PWc
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Carly Ayres liked thisCarly Ayres liked thisToday’s a big day for Jen & me. A year after we started designtown.nyc, the pandemic hit and we found ourselves operating a co-working space during lockdown and for the many quiet months that followed. We were luckily able to secure a disaster loan to get us through it. Now, in this remote-friendly world, the space is thriving and almost always at-capacity. And today, we officially paid off our disaster loan in full. ❤️
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Carly Ayres liked thisCarly Ayres liked thisEvery year we set out to make a magazine for Config. Same brief every time: make a beautiful printed artifact that says something about where design is right now. This year marks the 4th edition. What I love about this brief is the discipline it forces. The tools are moving so fast that by the time anything goes to print, the version you wrote about is already two releases behind. It's a dizzying kind of pressure, but also kind of freeing, because it makes you focus on the constants. The instinct to understand what something is before explaining what it does. The patience and curiosity to see the potential of new tools and materials, even if you don't know how to use them yet. The magazine has three covers—or three ways to start—each with a question that the content inside tries to answer. Flip through and you'll find imagery from Uta Eisenreich, Pedro Sanches, Matija Medved, and Espen Friberg running through each section, all bound together in pink spiral binding. The idea is you land on one, and then you keep going. Boundless creativity in an infinite loop. It's a lot like the creative process. You build off what you know, and you continue to learn as you go. That's always been my experience, with this project and all the others before it. I'm never fully sure where to start, but I'm always surprised by where we end up. S/o to the incredible team who made this magazine happen: Design: noideas.agency · Figma creative team: Alex Praeger, Jenny Xie, Anja Laubscher, Alia Fite, Emma Webster, Madeline Stafford, Jefferson Cheng, Maria Chimishkyan · Contributors: Alexander Kern, Ben Hill, Chad Colby, Gilles Desmadrille, Greg Huntoon, ✌️ Gui Seiz, Loredana Crisan, Yuhki Yamashita, Itay Schiff, Arlene Capsimalis, Sheta Chatterjee, Laurie Pressman, Nicole Meier, Anna Oh, Charlota Kolar Blunarova, Jésabel DC, Lee Black, Luke Fiorante, Sirinda (Kaew) Limsong, Thomas Vidal, Tom Giannattasio, Anna Andersen, Andrew Hogan, Shane Johnston, Ian Loring Shiver. And, of course, thanks to Dylan Field Nairi Tashjian Hourdajian Sheila Joglekar Vashee for making Figma a place where making things still matters. ❤️ Check out the full content lineup and find out how to snag a copy via the link: ▶️ https://lnkd.in/gUKd3QzD
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Carly Ayres liked thisCarly Ayres liked thisI left Figma in April after an incredible 4.5 years, planning to be a blob for a few months before deciding what's next. Blobbing quickly turned into building—just a lil idea I've had swirling in the back of my brain. Introducing Tunnel Rat: An iOS app for navigating the NYC subway. Realtime arrivals, service alerts, live routing, trip reminders, widgets, and more—free, private, reliable, and accessible by default. It's the first of (hopefully) many handy bits and bobs out of tktk studio. Give it a try and lemme know what you think! Feedback's more than welcome. https://lnkd.in/gWJGNSeE (And I still have no idea what's next... but if you're looking for a weird designer/dev/writer-hybrid human, let's chat.)
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Carly Ayres liked thisCarly Ayres liked thisWe are seeking a Design Systems Lead with extensive experience in owning design systems at large organizations. This role involves bootstrapping an intuitive semantic token system that supports design and product teams across multiple platforms and frameworks. Key qualifications include: · An impeccable eye for visual design. · Understanding of the nuanced differences between mobile, web, and React UI best practices. · Strong product sensibilities as you help inbound contributions from various product feature teams. · Familiarity with Figma, but primarily living on GH where they own their repo. · A true 50/50 design-engineer · Readiness to work with new AI tooling and comfort with ambiguity. If you meet these criteria, and you are ready to chat, we would love to hear from you. I will not have the capacity to answer all messages, so if you don't hear back that is why.
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Carly Ayres reacted on thisCarly Ayres reacted on this🚀 Today’s the day! I reunited with my friends at Stripe to build the website for joinopenstandard.com. This one has a *ton* of little details (and easter eggs! 🥚) and I had a blast working with Jonny Naismith, Dominic Baron-Chartrand, Peter Henderson, Michael Jeter, Eryn Lovich, Peter Bückle, and Stripe’s WPP team
Experience
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Education
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Rhode Island School of Design
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Activities and Societies: RISD Student Alliance: Industrial Design Department Representative 2009, 10, 11, President 2012
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Publications
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STEM + A = STEAM: On Paper
ARCADE Magazine
The STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) are no longer adequate to describe the needs of our society. Our contemporary world craves empathy and understanding in the face of an intensified onset of technological advances and a decline in direct interpersonal communication.
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Courses
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Entrepreneurship and New Ventures
193X
Projects
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» Design Tools, Research: STEM to STEAM
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One of the challenges of art-science collaboration is that there is no answer yet about how to combine the two in a fruitful way. At “Bridging STEM to STEAM: Developing New Frameworks for Art-Science-Design Pedagogy,” a 2011 conference held at RISD, participants from widely different backgrounds were asked to enter into an ambiguous space of unknowing with trust and grace. Graphic design was used to create tools to help them talk and discover something new together.
This included a set…One of the challenges of art-science collaboration is that there is no answer yet about how to combine the two in a fruitful way. At “Bridging STEM to STEAM: Developing New Frameworks for Art-Science-Design Pedagogy,” a 2011 conference held at RISD, participants from widely different backgrounds were asked to enter into an ambiguous space of unknowing with trust and grace. Graphic design was used to create tools to help them talk and discover something new together.
This included a set of cards that had words and mathematical symbols on one side and pictures on the other. These were intended to free people to make unexpected connections. Surprisingly, they also used the cards in unanticipated ways, making maps and clusters, gluing them to worksheets, and drawing complex diagrams.
On the studio walls, the words of the meteorologist Dr. Janet Barlow from the University of Reading in the UK were set in beautiful typographic form giving them it an ambiguity that spoke to both scientists and artists.Other creators -
Honors & Awards
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PRINT Regional Design Awards Judge
PRINT Magazine
As experts, tastemakers, and industry leaders, PRINT Regional Design Awards judges are esteemed in their fields. Their decisions will grant Regional Design Awards winners a taste of glory and act as a collection of the best the U.S. has to offer. More info: http://bit.ly/RDA2019Judges
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Transform Awards for: Best use of typography (Gold), Best use of a visual property (Bronze), Best brand evolution (Highly commended)
Transform Awards
Companies and agencies entering the Transform Awards have their work benchmarked against their peers and stand out amongst their competitors, rewarding excellence across the whole rebranding process. The awards recognize the creativity and strategic thought exercised and provide the opportunity to celebrate with clients and colleagues at the most prestigious awards event for rebranding. HAWRAF collaborated with Superunion on a sound-reactive redesign for the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra in 2018…
Companies and agencies entering the Transform Awards have their work benchmarked against their peers and stand out amongst their competitors, rewarding excellence across the whole rebranding process. The awards recognize the creativity and strategic thought exercised and provide the opportunity to celebrate with clients and colleagues at the most prestigious awards event for rebranding. HAWRAF collaborated with Superunion on a sound-reactive redesign for the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra in 2018 and received the following awards:
Best use of typography (Gold)
Best use of a visual property (Bronze)
Best brand evolution (Highly commended)
http://www.transformmagazine.net/awards/north-america/past-winners/2018-transform-awards-winners/ -
Fast Company Innovation By Design Awards Judge
Fast Company
An illustrious cast of designers, executives, and thought leaders will judge the 2018 Innovation By Design Awards, Fast Company’s seventh annual celebration of creativity in design. More info: https://www.fastcompany.com/90160155/meet-the-jury-of-the-2018-innovation-by-design-awards
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Hover States Site Feature (5x)
Hover States
Hover States is an industry-leading blog showcasing the best in alternative digital design. It's a place to discover, collect and come back to the sites you love, and share the sites you’ve made.
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siteInspire Feature (7x)
siteInspire
siteInspire is a showcase of the finest web and interactive design.
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Cannes Bronze Lion
Cannes Lions
Google Creative Lab 5 Application Site (creativelab5.com)
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100 Most Creative People in Business
Fast Company
Fast Company is excited to announce the addition of new members to the Most Creative People in Business, an exclusive group of influencers in business from across the economy and around the globe. More info: https://www.fastcompany.com/3067011/be-inspired-by-these-creative-leaders-who-are-changing-the-world
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FWA OF THE DAY
The FWA
Google Creative Lab 5 Application Site (creativelab5.com)
Organizations
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RISD Alumni Association Leadership Council
Member
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AIGA/NY
Board Member
-Founded in 1914, AIGA, the professional association for design, is a nonprofit professional membership organization headquartered in New York City. AIGA NY is the New York Chapter of AIGA. Established in 1982, as the association began to decentralize leadership, AIGA NY is the largest of 70 chapters with 3,000 members to date. The New York Chapter is a separately incorporated, nonprofit organization with its own Board of Directors, bylaws and tax-exempt status.
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RISD Alumni Association
Member
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RISD Alumni Board
Board Member
-Alumni throughout the country and the world find value in meeting with fellow grads on a regular basis to talk, share information and plan programs, activities and initiatives of interest to RISD people in their particular region. Online connections through RISD groups on LinkedIn and Facebook also provide valuable ways for alumni to keep in touch with one another both personally and professionally.
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Lacey Picazo
This is a season I’m doubling down on investing in my people—especially our younger talent. They are irreplaceable. If yours are not, that might be a symptom of different issues. At ZoCo Design, talent density is a differentiator—and one of my strongest motivations as a founder. Spoiler: we’re sitting at a 100 NPS for 2025 (and yes, I’m serious). Yet, I know that number is only possible because of our commitments to people: We hire exceptional thinkers, invest in them, create opportunities for growth, and celebrate their victories. We practice human-centricity in our business, not just in our client work. I’ve seen the headlines, where companies are shedding people (especially “juniors”). I’m all for efficiency and operational gains, but this trend feels short-sighted. AI is an accelerator, not a replacement. When it comes down to it, I’ll bet on my people every time.
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