Illustrating the digital world – Digital Journal

Image courtesy of Kasia Bojanowska

Opinions expressed by Digital Journal contributors are their own.

Kasia Bojanowska’s art style is a mix of abstract ideas and bold color palettes. Her ability to take an idea and create a visual representation results in evocative images that give shape to the intangible. Her art style is at once Pop art and Art Deco, Retro, and 80s, vibrant and thought-provoking.

Bojanowska grew up in Poland with artistic parents, both architects. Her love of art was given, and the moment the family’s first computer was set up, Bojanowska found her love of digital art in Microsoft Paint. She could spend hours on tutorials working to master digital art tools. This fascination with software was perhaps a guiding factor in her future editorial work. The majority of Bojanowska’s illustration work is focused on technology and artificial intelligence. “I think I naturally gravitate toward working with software startups and companies and creating illustrations about science for nature magazines,” she says of her work.

After advancing beyond the simplistic paint programs of early computers, Bojanowska took her love of digital illustration and enrolled in the University of Fine Arts in Krakow, Poland, where she graduated with honors with her Master’s degree in Fine Arts, specializing in graphic design.

Studying at the University of Fine Arts in Krakow gave Bojanowska a solid foundation in traditional art, but it wasn’t until she immersed herself in the world-renowned Polish School of Posters that she truly found her design passion. While in the poster design studio, Bojanowska delved into the movement’s use of vibrant colors, printed slogans, and popular symbols to create metaphors with concise messaging. These powerful visual forms of communication deeply influenced her artistic sensibilities. She incorporated capturing complex ideas in a succinct and impactful manner into her work ethos.

The Polish School of Posters was the inspiration she needed to develop a style characterized by strong visual metaphors and conceptually rich designs: her use of bold colors and shapes. Bojanowska later made the switch from student to teacher in the poster design studio. This new role allowed her to refine her skills and impart her knowledge to the next generation of designers.

Since graduation, Bojanowska has continued to grow as an artist. She competed in several exhibitions, including a group poster exhibition in Chicago, “Post no Bills” (2010), and most recently the 2012 Poster Biennale in Katowice, Poland. Bojanowska has won several awards as well. Most notably, she won the 2020 main prize at the Polish Graphic Design Awards for the editorial illustration category. 

Bojanowska has continued to live her creative philosophy through her work, which has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, Nature, The Verge, and Fast Company. Last year, she won an Award of Excellence from the Society of News Design for an editorial illustration featured in Nature for the article “The fraught quest to account for sex in biology research.” For The New York Times, Bojanowska’s illustrations have represented AI’s use of electricity, unregulated chatbots, and entering a digital world. All abstract ideas on their own are solidified through her vibrant colors, bold shapes, and textures. In one illustration for Forbes, Bojanowska conceptualized project management. She has also represented blockchain for RICS Modus, a global publication.

Her work with Github is of particular interest. Github, known by coders worldwide, created a community for coders called The ReadMe Project. Bojanowska illustrated several concepts and ideas for The ReadMe Project, including note-taking, workflows, and documentation. Putting “open source” on paper as words is easy, but giving that idea an image is more obscure. Bojanowska gave life to “open source” for Github.

For the last five years, Bojanowska has been working as a freelance artist, working with such clients as Apple, Google, AWS, Stripe, Twitter, and Github. She has also worked with institutions like The World Economic Forum, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Northwestern University School of Law. View her portfolio for more examples of her provocative art.

“I think that my superpower as a designer is being able to create visual representations of the most abstract tech or science subjects.” This is consistently the case as evidenced throughout her work. Kasia Bojanowska has taken her unique skills of translating abstract concepts into beautiful and understandable imagery.