Like many classically trained graphic designers before her, when Shira Inbar was starting out she had her sights set on a career in print. While she dreamed of eventually ending up as a book designer, it didn’t take long for her to broaden her horizons after joining the MFA graphic design programme at Yale. As course director Sheila Levrant de Bretteville continually pushed her to experiment with disciplines and techniques that she was less familiar with, she quickly discovered the joys of motion design.

“I think that with moving image you can control it to an extent, but then when it starts moving something that you didn’t expect happens. That’s very different to the classical design approach where you’re controlling every detail,” Inbar tells CR. “I think experiencing that made me fall in love with that type of magic and then apply that embrace of serendipity. Not to try and control every tiny little detail, but rather work with a bunch of ideas, put them together as best you can, and then be open to something new that might happen from that weird combination.”

Today, Inbar’s multidisciplinary practice sees her work at the intersection of editorial design, motion graphics, imagemaking and illustration, while her clients span the fields of entertainment, news, technology, pop culture and media at large, including the New York Times, Nike and the Atlantic. “A lot of what I do feels a little bit unrelated – how does motion graphics connect to illustration connect to magazines?” she reflects. “They’re different techniques and different disciplines but if you look at the type of thinking that goes into making these things, I think that they all stem from the same editorial way of looking at things.”

The designer’s first job out of college, working under the creative direction of Richard Turley at MTV, proved to be another formative experience for her. Collaborating with journalists, producers, editors and fellow designers, she would create multiple shortform video pieces a day at a time when social media giants like Instagram were still in their infancy.

“Later, when I did go and do more traditional design studio work, it was almost like taking a few steps back because I think that Richard’s vision and approach is so innovative and ahead of its time. The whole thing was an exercise in branding if you will, they were almost like advertorials but did so much more than that because they really pushed the voice of the platform in a new format,” she says.

She then joined Emily Oberman’s team at Pentagram (who she still freelances for regularly), where she designed and led projects spanning motion, editorial and brand identity for the likes of the Film Independent Spirit Awards, Queue Magazine by Netflix and Citizen Magazine. “There was this formula again of companies that were looking to expand into the editorial space through magazines,” she says. “Essentially, the role of the designer is so much more than just the designer. It’s actually inventing a magazine, or coming up with ideas for content, or ideas for how to curate content that exists, and really thinking how stories can be utilised to extend the experience of the brand, the publication, or the platform.

Since going independent, Inbar has worked on a number of projects that push the boundaries of editorial design, including a zine for cult production company A24 inspired by its slate of film releases. “It’s almost like you’re enlarging the world of the movie and inviting people to immerse themselves in it beyond sitting in a movie theatre and disappearing into the film itself. How do you keep engaging with it, how do you dive deeper into its world?,” she explains.

In Tax Season, which is edited by Everything Everywhere All At Once directors the Daniels, the zine nods to the film’s storyline by diving head first into the Kafkaesque reality of the IRS. Inside its pages is everything from interviews with former IRS undercover agents, to a wild guide to tax avoidance. Similarly, American Hu$tlers, which is edited by filmmaker Sean Baker for the launch of his film Red Rocket, is composed entirely of ads – both real and fake – paying tribute to the long tradition of ‘hustlers’ in American cinema (Midnight Cowboy, Panic in Needle Park, Mean Streets, to name just a few).

The designer has also been working with Mschf – the art collective/product studio known for its viral conceptual exploits – on a format-breaking publication inspired by their hackercore mentality, which features both print and web components. “Not every idea becomes an actual product but it exists somewhere in the form of a Word document or just something that someone suggested once. So I join them for a while, hear what they have been cooking, what they’ve launched and also what they haven’t launched, and then we take all these crazy ideas and put them together,” she says.

The common thread that runs through much of Inbar’s work, and one of the key differences to more traditional editorial design, is the need for conceptual thinking. Her design philosophy will also be one of the key themes discussed in her upcoming talk at MagCulture Live in New York. “The content doesn’t always come first – sometimes it’s more the thought of what the experience should be,” she explains. “So much of the publications and magazines that happen, especially in New York, live in that interesting intersection between news, culture, brands, design, community, urbanism – it’s a mix of a lot of things. As someone who works a lot in newspapers, how can you communicate what the content of the piece is about but also reflect the culture around that topic?”

While at times the designer still feels torn between her highly generalist approach versus the craft and expertise that comes with having a specialism, over the years she’s come to realise that she’s happiest when able to “cross-pollinate”. This is also reflected in her part-time role at Parsons School of Design, where she has taught since 2015. “Over the years the education and the curriculum has progressed into a more multidisciplinary approach where the briefs are more like, ‘make a digital experience and make a physical experience, and they need to somehow work together’.”

“It’s this back and forth that I’m constantly exploring in school and in my work as well,” she continues. “I think that being in academia in that context is almost like having a little mirror that walks with you. You constantly need to self-reflect both on your practice and what you learn when you work, and also somehow find a way to package it into something that you can invite students to engage in and experience themselves.”

As for what the future holds for Inbar, she’s keen to continue collaborating with as many studios, designers and companies as possible but ultimately is happy to remain as an independent practitioner. “In the States, there’s a pressure to corporatise yourself if you’re working independently. When are you opening a studio? When are you starting to hire people? When are you becoming official? I feel like if you stay independent for too long then you become a hobbyist, or something,” she says.

“If I had to go into a corporate right now, I would probably be more of a manager or a director, and the result of that is that you’re in a lot of meetings, you make a lot of decisions, you mentor a lot of people. You need a lot of talent to be able to do that and finding the joy in being that leader in an industry is a great thing, so I’m full of respect and awe, but if I insist on being honest with myself and what I enjoy the most, it is really the making of things, so I think that I would like in the future to just sustain that.”

MagCulture Live New York 2024 takes place in-person at 99 Scott in Brooklyn as well as virtually on July 14; shira-inbar.com