Chaos, color, and collaboration
What do you get when you combine a prolific designer with a creative studio that encourages artists to run wild? The answer: a rigged points system, genuine belly laughs, and mind-blowing art.
Tina Touli travelled to a Melbourne suburb to spend the day getting wildly creative with Nounish to celebrate her brand new 3D typography assets designed exclusively for Motion Array.
We’ve admired Tina Touli’s work for years, and her 3D typography art templates for Motion Array are just as vibrant and joyful as you’d expect. But Tina’s talent spans far beyond the beautiful end results — her creative process is just as magical.
So to showcase her creative journey, we joined forces with Nounish, who designed an art game to see how Tina’s mind works, and give you insight into her creative process, alongside Nounish’s co-founder, John Gavin.
The result is hilarious, silly, colourful, fun, and playful. So read on to be inspired by Tina’s creative journey, the story of Nounish, and how their shared love for curiosity and play fuels their creativity.
Who is Tina Touli?
If you aren’t familiar, Tina Touli is a world-renowned designer, artist, and creative director. She’s well known for blending type, movement, and tactile depth, combining 2D and 3D typography, and experimenting with analogue and digital elements.
Born and raised in Athens, Tina does not shy away from play. In fact, it’s at the epicentre of everything she does. She loves nothing more than spending her days in the studio messing around with glitter, inventing new colours, pouring oil onto an iPad, or designing stop animation with the help of a vacuum cleaner.
Add to that her eclectic taste in colour, patterns, and textures alongside a love for digital experimentation, and it’s fair to say there’s nothing quite like a design by Tina Touli.
Her unique approach to design has won her multiple awards, including Print Magazine’s “15 Best Young Designers Under 30” in 2017 and she’s regularly invited to speak at art and design events and conferences around the world. In 2025 alone, she’s appeared at events for Paradiso, Graphic Days, NOW25, Adobe MAX, Bounce, and Advertising Week.
She opened her own studio, Tina Touli Design, in 2013, where she’s created visuals for major brands including The New Yorker, Adobe, Dell, Samsung, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Tate, and even Selena Gomez’s mental fitness platform Wondermind. She’s a regular on industry judging panels and is one of the most respected creative minds in the industry.
She fell in love with design after signing up for an editing course while at university in London. “I loved creating, and loved drawing, and I knew I wanted to do that,” Tina says. “But I had no idea I could get an actual job in this. But it slowly became my passion.”
Tina developed an interest in typography early in her career. “I always loved the letter forms in typography. It wasn’t conscious, but I was drawn to typography, and picked more projects that involved type or led them that way myself. It came naturally, and I didn’t notice until a few years later when I realized most of my portfolio has typography in it.”
And who is Nounish?
No one’s doing it quite like Nounish. Their mission is to “inspire creatives around the world to tame their fears and run wild with their creativity.”
They aim to help artists and creators push the limits of their imaginations through art, play, and, most importantly, fun. The studio was created by a group of friends who’d spent their careers making commercials. They felt disillusioned with the lack of creative freedom involved, and the focus on a perfect end product rather than the joy of the creating process.
“It’s almost a universal experience to be a modern creative making art for a living, and being quite stressed,” John Gavin, co-founder of Nounish, explains. “You start to lose touch with why you did it in the first place, and the process is just like, get me through this thing. It’s only about finishing and making things as perfect as possible. Perfectionism is incentivized, and failure is not an option.”
So John launched Nounish in 2022, a studio where the creative process is more important than the end product. “We’re trying to enjoy ourselves for a living, so we’re a YouTube channel and entertainment brand, and we’re making games and challenges for artists to participate in or just watch and enjoy themselves. The point of it is to take the spotlight off the end product, which everyone’s obsessed with, and try and celebrate the process, and turn it into something valuable for a change.”
Nounish has created games and challenges for dozens of artists around the world, providing a space for them to create without limits, without self-consciousness, and in a space where failure isn’t forbidden, it’s celebrated.
The creative challenge
Clearly, the best way to show the world the full extent of Tina’s creativity and her new typography assets for Motion Array was through a game with Nounish.
So Tina jetted over to Nounish’s Melbourne studio from London, and was catapulted straight into a creative challenge called: “Who is the most Tina Touli?”
The idea of the game is simple (ish). Nounish co-founder John and Tina would go head-to-head to design motion graphics that included Tina’s new Motion Array typography. Whoever used the most Tina Touli-esque techniques and came up with the most Tina Touli-esque design would be the winner.
John’s challenge was to study her work and replicate it as best as he could, and Tina’s challenge was simply to be herself.
Celebrating the creative process
John didn’t stand a chance, so he had a little help. He was given a Tina Touli box full of goodies that Tina uses to make art, a Tina Touli guide book complete with a checklist for Tina-isms, and Tina’s typography template handcrafted for Motion Array. They had one day to create a piece of motion design, and whoever scored the most points won a tiny Tina Touli typography trophy (try saying that three times fast).
“In my studio, I have boxes they call treasure boxes, with all kinds of materials,” Tina explains. “People say it’s just a rubbish collection, but you can find literally anything and just play around.”
John’s tactic was to use every single bit of the graphic template, and the centerpiece for his artwork was ‘Yes and’. He used every background available, every colour that the human eye can perceive, and made as many artworks as he possibly could in a bid to win points.
John got a point every time he used one of the ten Tina Touli tenets in the guidebook, including ‘Blur the lines between digital and analogue,’ ‘Push yourself into new creative territories,’ and ‘Making a mess is part of the process.’
Tina’s phrase was ‘Be yourself.’ The first thing she did was place her graphic under a glass container, pour some water droplets on top, and then dry it with a hair dryer. She filmed it and made an instant motion graphic of water bubbles shimmying around. “Sometimes my set-ups are very DIY and really unprofessional-looking,” Tina laughs. “I’ve used a vacuum cleaner to create motion graphics before.”
John, meanwhile, soon discovered Tina’s love for tea, so he designed typography assets out of tea leaves.
The creativity was off the charts from the get-go, and Tina found it energizing to find a studio with similar values and motivation to her. “We are actually doing the same thing,” she says. “We’re experimenting and playing around the whole day. So I loved collaborating with people who are doing something similar.”
To find out who won, head over to our YouTube channel.
Tina’s typography templates
Tina’s new typography templates for the Motion Array community were created from playing. The original plan was to create an effect for existing typography, but that soon developed into creating a custom alphabet with custom lettering. “I loved being given the freedom to create without rushing,” Tina says. “I think that’s reflected in the final template, that I had the luxury to play around.”
Tina’s lettering design was inspired by playing with plasticine in her studio. “I created typography with Play-Doh,” she says. “I started with the letter B, and that led to similar experimentations and just playing with the letter forms. It worked so nicely, I created a 3D piece out of that.”
The result is gorgeous, thick, textured, playful, 3D lettering that curls deliciously around one another. In typical Tina Touli fashion, the background templates are maximalist patterns and vibrant colours, guaranteed to inject a sense of joy and play into your project.
“I love experimenting and creating by hand,” Tina says. “I often jump back and forth between analogue and digital, create, edit, and go back again. I love playing around with different materials and techniques. It allows you to experiment and be creative and explore areas that you wouldn’t otherwise discover.”
For Tina, typography is about much more than letters. “It’s a visual language that conveys a message,” she says. “And you can have the same word with so many different meanings. I love the changing letter forms in typography. I love the curves, the shapes, how you can write the number three in 10,000 different ways. There is so much possibility.”
Tina and Nounish’s advice for creators
In a world where more and more creators use the same methods and templates, Tina cuts through by finding inspiration in the physical realm as well as the digital. “Using things around you can inspire you to create things that feel unique and different,” she explains. “So it gives this surprise element. And even if something fails, try different ways, or try something else. Creatives need to create something new that shows their own voice.”
And pay attention to what you’re drawn to. “Do more of what you enjoy the most, because most likely that’s what you’re going to be the best at creating and doing,” Tina says.
Tina and Nounish share the same ethos around focusing on the creative process rather than the results. That’s why Tina loves to surprise people by using unusual material in unique ways. “I’ll create paper sculptures, and people think they’re 3D but it’s actually analogue,” she says. “So I like playing around with that approach, that something analogue can look digital if you edit it a bit.”
Nounish hopes that their collaboration with Tina will inspire creatives to get out of their comfort zones and think outside the box. “The reason we exist is because we want to try and enjoy being creative again,” John says.
And his advice for creators? “I think the quicker you can get courageous and let yourself fail, the better,” John says. “Make something every day and don’t worry about whether it’s a portfolio piece or whether people think it’s bad, because you will find creative fulfillment and learn how to be good at something. That’s all that matters. But that requires a lot of courage.”
Tina’s hopes for her typography
Tina is just as excited as we are to see how the Motion Array community uses her typography template.
“I’m most excited to see what people are going to create,” she says. “In the challenge, my message was ‘be yourself,’ because even if you have the same assets as someone else, you can create so many totally different outcomes. So I can’t wait to see how people use these assets and embed them with their own creative voices, and see all the different ways it’s used.”
Check out Tina Touli’s brand new and exclusive typography template.
