Instagram’s @design

💡 As part of the @nycxdesign festival, the exhibition SHINE features original light objects by 70 designers. “SHINE is not a show about New York City itself, but a reflection on the culture and people who inhabit it,” says curator Harry Allen. Meet some of the designers: 🔆 @esquestudio (Andi Kovel) experiments with a singular material concept and magnifies its details, centering her practice on isolated exploration. 🔆 @ehandojodesign (Elmer Handojo) creates thoughtful products and experiences that bridge storytelling, technology and object-making. 🔆 @bechara_maalouf_ (Bechara Maalouf) uses new and found materials to explore how memory changes over time. 🔆 @liyangzhang_studio (Liyang Zhang) explores the elemental aspects of architecture — light, material and form — on an intimate, tactile scale. 🔆 @loloostia (Lolo Ostia) brings together art, science and environmental awareness through material storytelling, exploring collaboration with living systems, from microorganisms to algae. 🔆 @leebroom (Lee Broom) creates sculptural pieces that explore the emotional and physical possibilities of light, merging material, craft and innovation into atmospheric, expressive forms. 🔆 @karim_rashid_official (Karim Rashid) blends technology and emotion through his philosophy of sensual minimalism, shaping contemporary life with over 4,000 designs across 47 countries. 🔆 @likemindedobjects (Elise McMahon) works in response to waste streams and healthier materials. creating contemporary, playful takes on creative reuse and material experimentation. 🔆 @jimmy.rojas.design (Jimmy Rojas) creates poetic products, spaces and brand narratives that interrupt the numbness of modern life and invite people to reconnect with their surroundings, routines and themselves. 🔆 @sabrina_merayo_nuniez (Sabrina Merayo Nuniez) creates sculptural ecosystems where matter grows, transforms and exists, combining living systems with responsive technologies. 🔆 @lot_ek (LOT-EK) is a collective that reimagines dismissed industrial objects as architecture and design, using upcycling as their material practice and “beauty in the ordinary” as their design principle. 📅May 14-20 at @theseaportnyc

📸 Stay in the moment with Instants — our newest feature dropping this month. With just one tap, you’ll be able to capture and share moments throughout your day in real time with friends. No edits, no uploads: Just life as it happens. With Instants, the Instagram Design team stripped everything back to make the experience feel as effortless as possible, like you’re passing a note to a friend. “Every design decision was about removing friction,” says the Design team. “So you stay in the moment instead of performing for it. Also, it was important that creating and looking at friends’ instants felt lighthearted, so it doesn’t feel intimidating to share.” Get even faster access to your Instants camera with our dedicated Instants app. And starting in June, you’ll be able to share instants hands-free with Meta glasses. Rolling out today, find Instants at the bottom right in your Instagram inbox, or download the app on the Apple Store or Google Play.

💃 “Fashion is always art,” says designer @robertwun (Robert Wun). ”And I think everything that is honest, genuine and has meaning is always a form of art itself.” Known for his sculptural silhouettes and cinematic designs — including work with Wong Kar-wai, Lady Gaga and The Hunger Games series — the London-based haute couture designer made history in 2023 as the first designer from Hong Kong to join Paris Haute Couture Fashion Week. This year, his work is featured in the @metcostumeinstitute spring 2026 exhibition “Costume Art” — and he’s dressing @naomiosaka (Naomi Osaka) for the Met Gala. “She has so much passion and love for fashion and design,” says Robert, “So I think we really connected in that way. The way that we designed this, there’s a lot of trust between us.” Robert documented his creative process through the lens of his @raybanmeta glasses which gave him a “different perspective” when reliving “the way that I look at the piece with my real eyes.” On the Met Gala carpet, the look unfolds in two acts: first, a sculpted ivory coat with crystal-revealing seams and flared, fountain-like feathers. Then the reveal: a fully Swarovski-crystallized deep red gown—659,000 stitches, four shades of red, and 3,280+ hours of handwork—mapping the human anatomy, crystal by crystal. Robert is excited to bring the magic of costume art to life. “I hope that when people see the looks on the carpet of this year’s Met Gala, they will believe imagination matters.” ✨

#Classof2026 📒 Documenting six months of her personal web browsing history, KATELYN LEE IS ONLINE — the eponymous work of @parsonsschoolofdesign graduating senior @ketalyn.lee (Katelyn Lee) — treating her digital activity as a parallel record of her lived experience. “My work is research-driven and I am especially interested in reframing everyday digital behaviors into designed artifacts,” she says. “Many of my projects start with existing material, like browser histories, found images or behavioral patterns and explore how narratives emerge from structure.” Made up of three books, a poster and a website, her project translates 24,740 digital entries into a physical archive you can actually hold. “Working on this project shifted how I think about authorship and the visibility of data,” says Katelyn. “Especially with how much of our lives exist and will continue to exist in a digital context.”

#Classof2026 🖌️ “I’d describe my work as flowy and semi-realistic,” says recent @georgiatech graduate @artofzwist (ZWIST). “Like a swirly, pretty, dreamlike dimension.” With an impressive roster of clients already under her belt — including Nike, Coinbase, EPIC: The Musical and Activision — ZWIST refined her painting techniques while she completed her studies in Computer Science and Industrial Design. “Being both a student and an artist helped me figure out what I actually wanted to pursue,” shares ZWIST. “Through building my social media and creative work, I realized I had something special. I decided to take the risk of moving to NYC to pursue art and content creation full-time.” 🎨 Music by Global Genius

#Classof2026 🪑 Working at the intersection of furniture and product design, senior @tefletcherr (Toby Pritchard-Fletcher) has been focused on making and hands-on experimentation during his time at @msoa_product (Manchester Metropolitan University). “It’s made me more aware of the full lifecycle of what I design, not just how it looks, but how it’s made, used and kept,” says Toby. “I’ve become more conscious of the responsibility designers have in shaping not only objects, but the systems and behaviours around them.” His Runda chair and footstool, made from beech, pinewood and upcycled Carhartt dungarees, is set to be exhibited at the MMU Degree Show in June. His favorite part of studying at MMU? “The balance between conceptual thinking and making,” says Toby. “Being able to take an idea all the way through to a resolved, physical outcome.” 📐

#Classof2026 ✂️ @houstoncitycollege senior @darrion.nguyen (Darrion Nguyen) has forged a unique path from scientific research into fashion design — honored just last year as one of the top 10 designers at the Pierre Cardin Young Designers Awards. He’s hoping to continue his work in graduate school to refine his technical skills and creative perspective. “I tend to design from a place of nostalgia, especially inspired by retrofuturistic sportswear,” says Darrion. “Recently, I’ve been focusing on menswear and playing around with shapes and silhouettes, just seeing how far I can push them while also keeping them grounded.” 🪡

#Classof2026 📱 Designer @eeezeen (Jinwon Lee / Eugene)’s creative work explores the boundaries between the digital and the physical. As a graduating senior at the Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts London (UAL), he’s been learning to see technology through a humanistic lens. “Not just how to build it,” he says. “But how to question it.” In his project “Digital Garden,” he invited participants to “water” digital life with sound, exploring fundamental questions about the digital world we live in. “My goal is to be a ‘Humanist for the Next Generation,’” shares Eugene. “A designer and developer who brings both a user-centred rigour and a critical eye to the technologies of tomorrow.” 🚰 Software/Sound by @eeezeen VFX/Installation by @ziyi_ya_ya 3D/Hardware by @caterina.52068 Made for @ual_cci

#Classof2026 🎓 The next generation of artists and designers are getting ready to graduate — and all month long, we’ll be featuring talented students from the Global Class of 2026. First up is illustrator @zogilmart (Zoe Gilmore), a senior at the @risd1877 (Rhode Island School of Design or RISD). Her illustration work on the Artemis II activity card was just published on the @nasa website, where she worked as an intern last year. At RISD, she explored painting, printmaking, bookmaking and more before focusing her work on illustration — inspired by nature, science and storytelling every step of the way. “As a student, I’ve learned so much about how the art I make can communicate complex topics,” says Zoe. “In the future, I hope to continue contributing my work to causes I believe in, such as science communication and advocacy!”

🪩 The surreal 3D mosaic sculptures of @colinrobertsart (Colin Roberts) explore ideas through architecture, light and whimsical shapes. With a pair of @raybanmeta AI glasses, he gives us a firsthand look at how his signature pillow sculptures come together. “I was originally inspired by architecture, light art and miniature worlds,” says Colin. “I wanted to create my own transparent buildings based on fun organic shapes that utilized natural light — that’s where this body of work originated.” An artist since his highchair scribbling days, Colin earned a BFA in Fine Arts Sculpture from Otis College of Art and Design. Informed by a wide range of creative experiences — drawing, painting, sculpting and modelmaking for everyone from architects to toy designers and film FX studios — Colin transforms and celebrates everyday objects in his radiant approach to sculpture. Music by Giulio Cercato

🌷 Building on the tradition of stained glass, artist @gracehoran (Grace Horan) has pushed the art form into something a little less formal — and a little more personal. Featuring digital images of bucolic landscapes, florals and even other lamps themselves, Grace builds lamps and other objects that feature a collage of images she’s collected over time. “I use images to act as the ‘stain’ for the glass, treating them as physical materials that can be built into objects,” she says. “A lot of the work ends up feeling like personal collections or little image archives to me.” Grace uses a process that combines traditional stained glass methods with an improvised twist, using paper models to iterate on ideas before she dives into the work of assembling and soldering her glass panels together. “The most rewarding part is seeing all the pieces finally come together,” she says, “Especially since so much of the work happens before the final shape is even fully established and seeing images I’ve been collecting for so long get turned into an object.” ⚡

💡 Brighten up your feed with @jombus_design (Jo Fentress), a designer, maker and photographer who dreams up playfully minimalistic lamps out of their home in St. Louis. Using a combination of hand-crafting and 3D printing, they use materials like recycled glass tile, polylactic acid (PLA) and jesmonite to create their lamps from scratch. “I love incorporating unique and satisfying interactions into the lights I design in order to hopefully create little moments of magic and wonder,” says Jo. Drawing inspiration from music, movies and lighting design legends like Ingo Maurer, they bring a wide range of references to their design process — and each lighting piece comes down to iteration and experimentation until it feels just right. 🔆