From lovingly arranged shop windows to mountains illuminated with local legends, the Milan-based designer finds inspiration in unexpected places, turning everyday observations into colourful identities, installations and illustrations.
When gathering the legends behind her latest installation, Tatiana Egoshina had to eat three extra helpings of pasta. The designer spent a week in Castelmezzano, a tiny mountain village in southern Italy, listening to stories at the table of a hundred-year-old woman and drinking coffee with grappa (“I won’t say how many”, she admits). “These are things you simply cannot Google,” Tatiana says.
The stories of herbal healers, years of fire, witches and white dogs became Ceneri di Pietra, a videomapping piece made with sound artist Livia Borzetti, who spent the week decoding the local dialect while Tatiana sketched symbols. The finished work is a moving composition of light, poetry and quadraphonic sound, which was projected straight onto cliffs of the Dolomiti Lucane during The Breath of Light, an international rock-mapping residency run by the town and Basilicata Creativa in June 2026 – it also went on to win first prize at the residency. “What I remember most vividly is standing in front of the mountain at night and seeing something that had existed only in our imagination become part of the landscape. Quite literally the biggest canvas I’ve ever worked on!”
The route to that mountain began in Moscow, where she earned a BA in Visual Communication and learned to work in black, white and one extra colour, usually red. She studied under Anna Kulachek, then joined Strelka Institute, whose identity was designed by OK-RM.
The job taught her “to think across formats, embrace bold compositions, refine typography down to the millimetre”. Her Strelka bar posters from that period show what she means, with neon letters fanning out like stage lights in hot pink and electric blue. A stint at Readymag followed, where designing a web publishing tool meant working for “a particularly curious and demanding audience” of fellow designers. After that came identities for film festivals, motion graphics for fashion titles and art direction for Material Bank, Benetton and Condé Nast.
Colour was something that really clicked for Tatiana during a trip to Palermo about 10 years ago. “The sky, the sea, the greenery and flowers, the fruit, the painted walls and frescoes, all these colours existed together in one perfectly natural composition,” she remembers. “I didn’t so much understand how to use colour as feel it. Since then, colour, Italy and I have been pretty much inseparable.” You can see the result in her IndieLisboa posters, where bright colours burst into a confetti of rectangular shapes, and in her flower plates, where blue and gold petals bloom across white china.
When Tatiana moved to Milan, she became inspired by its urban language – especially the things she would find in shop windows. She began collecting old shop signs, packaging, handwritten notes and “things people have made with more enthusiasm than technical skill”. She adds, “There are so many shop windows and signs where someone clearly put their whole heart into choosing a decorative font or arranging a display. I find that incredibly touching.” Reading Susan Sontag’s Notes on “Camp” solidified these influences. “I realised that this was exactly what had fascinated me all my life: the unintentional, the sincere, the accidentally beautiful.”
Her references stretch far beyond design and into folklore, poetry, architecture and the way a pink-and-red pairing in a Prada collection turns up in graphic design six months later. “I think the important thing is to stay curious about the world rather than just about design,” she says. “Otherwise, designers risk making references to other designers who are referencing other designers.” She adds, “We’re such a boring bunch!” and would take an evening with a forensic psychologist, a poet or a ballet dancer over another designer’s moodboard.
Before turning to any screens, Tatiana digs through her research until something sparks. “I often find that the answer is already hidden somewhere within the material,” she says, and then she reaches for a pencil. “I love starting with my hands,” she explains, quoting a film line that stuck with her: “I draw with a pencil because my thoughts move at the same speed as my pencil across the paper.” She likens the stage to a sculptor sizing up a block. “I need to touch it, feel its weight, volume, texture, temperature and resistance. Is it marble or clay? Do I need to add some water or reach for a chisel?” By the end of a project, the intuition has hardened into a visual system built to grow and adapt without losing its character.
That thinking shaped her identity for Fortune Cookie, an Italian communications agency, for which she designed the logo and website between 2024 and 2026. The name gave her the concept. “Everything a brand needs is already somewhere inside it, just waiting to be discovered and brought to light.” She turned it into folded ribbons of colour carrying messages like “Do not panic”, “The end is near” and “You are loved”, some of which replaced the brand name altogether.
As the brand grew and new graphics were being created, and the team began drifting from the guidelines, she vibe-coded an online tool that lets them generate their own fortune-cookie graphics within the rules. “A good identity shouldn’t depend on its designer being around forever. It should be able to grow on its own.”
Next, she wants to bring her commercial and artist work closer together with more installations and residencies in the works. But whatever she’s making – an identity, ceramic plate or poster – humour will almost always be at the centre of it, proving that design doesn’t always need to be serious. “I’m very aware of the darker sides of life, and perhaps that’s exactly why I’m so drawn to humour, colour and playfulness. It’s not about pretending that difficult things don’t exist, but about reminding myself and others that they’re not all there is. There’s still beauty, absurdity, tenderness and plenty of reasons to laugh.”
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