Talia Cotton is a New York City–born designer, coder, educator, and founder of Cotton, a creative agency working at the intersection of branding and technology.

Her creative life began with an unusually even pull toward science, math, English, and art. In high school, she made math comics and wrote a tenth-grade research paper on the mathematical structures behind Bach’s Two-Part Inventions—an early sign of the way analytical and expressive thinking would become inseparable in her work.

Cotton originally imagined a future in professional piano performance and composition. She attended Carnegie Mellon before eventually studying Communication Design at Parsons School of Design. There, one required coding class opened a new direction: at a time when code was still peripheral to many design programs, she began applying it to her projects whether or not an assignment required it. Code became less a technical add-on than another material for thinking—one that could make identities more responsive, systems more expressive, and design ideas more precise.

Before founding her studio, Cotton led digital brand work at Champions Design and built an independent design-and-code practice, where she gained experience working for and several clients and alongside several studios. At Pentagram, she worked across two teams, leading the design and development of data-driven and algorithmic identities with Michael Bierut and Giorgia Lupi. Her work has included collaborations with organizations such as Google Arts & Culture, The New York Times, the Gates Foundation, and MIT, bringing computation into brand systems, editorial work, and digital experiences.

In 2023, she founded Cotton, a creative agency that treats custom code as an integral part of the creative process, meant to be a home for that special kind of emerging designer-coder. Alongside her studio work, Cotton teaches coding and interaction design, and advocates for designers to approach technology with curiosity, rigor, and purpose. Named a GDUSA Responsible Designer to Watch and a recipient of The One Club’s Young Guns under 30 award, she offers emerging designers a compelling model: follow the interests that seem unrelated, build a distinctive point of view, and learn the tools that let it take form.