As a creative director, Adam Hilborn has made an impact over two decades. He has helped shape the interior of a maternity ward and the interior of a spacecraft: two settings in which a person passes from one state of being into another, uncertain, a little afraid, and entirely reliant on the space around them to hold steady. It is this thread, more than any single client name, that runs beneath his career. Hilborn does not so much design objects as design the minutes in which people are most exposed.
An Apprenticeship in Breadth
He began, as many visual thinkers do, with cartoons and comics: a habit of mind he still describes simply as being “a visual storyteller.” That instinct was formalized at Northern Secondary School’s advanced arts program, sharpened at Sheridan College, and later given motion at Max the Mutt Animation School. He left with a Best in Class honor and, not long afterward, was invited to join OCAD University at just 24 years old, where he would spend the next decade teaching and designing the curriculum for interdisciplinary design.
What followed was less a career path than a deliberate accumulation of range. He co-founded Parishil Design Studio in 2004, pulling inspiration from Pushpin and Superstudio through six years of editorial illustration, brand identity, and gallery work: the studio’s final year included running a twelve-month gallery space that staged ten exhibitions in its own right.
From there, he moved through a succession of Toronto studios: Amoeba Corp, a period of independent practice, and senior roles at John St. and Jacknife. Along the way, he built the brand system for the Red Bull ThreeStyle International DJ Competition and ran creative direction for Red Bull Music Academy’s Toronto chapter; proof that even his commercial work had a performance instinct behind it.
Each stop added a discipline the last one hadn’t: identity systems, packaging, wayfinding, editorial art direction. It was an apprenticeship conducted in public, across several shops rather than one, and it left him fluent in branding and product design well before he set foot in Silicon Valley.
Two Extremes of Vulnerability
That fluency met its most consequential test at IDEO, where Hilborn spent six years rising from Principal Designer to Senior Design Lead. There, he contributed to the redesign of birthing centers across the United States and to a program supporting at-risk communities in adhering to preventative HIV medication: two briefs unified by the same underlying question: how does one design for a person at their most physically and emotionally exposed, navigating a system they neither chose nor fully understand?
In 2015, he carried that question somewhere it had not been asked before. He led the team designing the astronaut experience for Blue Origin: the capsule interior, together with the audio and visual wayfinding intended to guide a first-time passenger through an entirely unfamiliar physical event. That work flew aboard Blue Origin’s first crewed launch, on July 20, 2021.
Beauty Within a Larger System
Hilborn resists being defined by any single discipline. “My growth is driven by curiosity and resourcefulness—observing, testing, and making,” he says. “My focus is on utilizing diverse approaches, methods, and tools to solve complex design problems, ultimately creating meaningful relationships in human interactions within a greater system”—a philosophy he traces across Nike, Rivian, MoMA, Delta Air Lines, and Blue Origin: work in which no single object matters as much as the larger structure it has to serve.
Two engagements show what that looks like under pressure. At Ford, as Interim Brand Director inside Greenfield Labs, he spent a year doing something closer to diplomacy than design: giving a studio nicknamed a “renegade lab” a shared sense of purpose before it hardened into today’s global D-Ford network. At Rivian, as Senior Brand Lead, he ran the two-year “Project Soul” initiative; rebuilding the company’s entire brand system from the ground up, down to a custom typeface, Rivian Wide, engineered to hold its integrity across languages and formats, while the company scaled under more public scrutiny than most automakers ever face.
The same discipline turns up in quieter registers, too: a guidebook for Mitsui’s Moon Creative Lab, a research push at Delta to make boarding less miserable, a sustainability pop-up for IKEA, a membership overhaul at MoMA. Today, working independently through WE3 alongside a small group of former IDEO designers, he splits his attention between higher-profile clients like EquipmentShare and far quieter engagements, among them a full end-to-end redesign of the user experience for T3 Telematics’ installation process, proof that the discipline doesn’t scale down for smaller names.
On Cities and the Long View
Hilborn’s interest in systems doesn’t stop at the scale of a brand. Ask him about the future, and he’ll talk about cities. With most of the world’s population expected to eventually live in urban areas, he sees the built environment as the next great unsolved design brief, and a genuinely hopeful one. He returns often to two ideas that aren’t his own but that clearly shape how he thinks: the writer John Gray’s notion that progress functions less as a guarantee than as a necessary illusion, something societies need to believe in order to keep improving, and the urbanist Jan Gehl’s observation that designing cities with kindness in mind costs next to nothing compared to any other kind of civic investment. It’s a philosophy consistent with everything else in his portfolio, namely, that good design, at any scale, is less about spectacle than about lowering the cost of being human somewhere.
A Continuing Practice
Hilborn shows little interest in narrowing his focus. He speaks of continuing to move between disciplines and industries, of writing more about design, and of returning, eventually, to animation, the same instinct for visual storytelling that carried him from a childhood sketchbook to the inside of a spacecraft, still in search of the next system worth designing.
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About the Author
Sylvia Anderson is a business and design writer.
