The people behind the craft
A small, dedicated team of designers, artists, and strategists who love what they do.
Maya Chen
Co-founder & Creative Director
Maya Chen co-founded Fireflies Collective after a decade of shaping brand identities for cultural institutions and independent studios across New York. She believes that great design begins with listening, and that the most resonant visual work emerges from genuine collaboration. When she's not leading creative strategy, you'll find her sketching in Prospect Park or hunting for rare vinyl in Bushwick.
Eliot Frost
Co-founder & Design Lead
Eliot Frost is the systems thinker behind Fireflies Collective's digital practice, bringing order and elegance to complex design challenges. With a background in both computer science and graphic design, he bridges the gap between creative vision and technical execution. He's happiest when building design systems that empower teams and scale beautifully.
Ava Rodriguez
Senior Designer
Ava Rodriguez is a print-obsessed designer with a deep love for the tactile side of visual communication. She brings warmth, precision, and a sharp typographic eye to every packaging and editorial project that comes through the studio. Originally from Miami, she credits her bold color sensibility to growing up surrounded by Caribbean and Latin American visual culture.
Lars Hoekstra
Motion Designer
Lars Hoekstra brings static brands to life through motion, crafting animations and video content that capture attention and communicate with immediacy. With a background in film and a deep fascination with the physics of movement, he creates work that feels organic and purposeful. He joined Fireflies Collective to push the boundaries of what a design studio can do with time-based media.
Sofia Petrov
Illustrator & Artist
Sofia Petrov is a multidisciplinary illustrator whose work spans editorial illustration, hand lettering, and large-scale murals across Brooklyn and beyond. Her style blends Eastern European folk art influences with a contemporary graphic sensibility, creating imagery that is at once familiar and surprising. She brings a handmade warmth to the studio's output that no algorithm could replicate.
Idris Adams
Senior Digital Designer
Idris Adams leads digital design at the studio's Los Angeles office, with a particular focus on the messy intersection of visual identity and product design. He's the person clients call when a beautiful brand has to live as a working app, and he treats interface design as exacting craft rather than an afterthought to the logo work.
Iris Chen
Brand Strategist
Iris Chen leads brand strategy across the studio. She's the person who runs the discovery sprints, conducts the customer interviews, and turns a tangle of stakeholder opinions into the single sentence a creative team can actually design against. She has the rare gift of being both rigorous and surprising in the same breath.
Marcus Boateng
Studio Producer
Marcus Boateng runs the operational side of the studio from the London office. He's the producer behind the scenes of every multi-stream engagement, the person who keeps print runs, photography shoots, and platform launches landing on the same date — and he does it without ever raising his voice.
From the Blog
Insights on design, creativity, and culture.
Behind the Scenes: Our Creative Process
A candid look inside how Fireflies Collective moves from blank page to finished work — the rituals, the chaos, and the method in between.
The Art of Creative Collaboration: What We Have Learned Working Together
Honest reflections on what makes creative collaboration actually work — from structured critique to shared ownership and the courage to let go of your ideas.
Designing for Emotion: Beyond Usability
Why the most memorable design makes people feel something — and how we approach emotional resonance as a core design principle.
