Yuliya Ratnikova carries a portable scanner the way other people carry a phone, pointing it at whatever surface stops her on the street: rust, peeling paint, the underside of a beer coaster. Those scans, plus a hoard of fruit stickers and other small collected objects, feed a poster practice built on “experiments with textures, overlays, various effects, and the use of bold colours”. “I love finding interest in the things most people walk straight past,” she has said. She is design director at the branding agency Ascend Studio, in London, and the scanner comes out well outside office hours.

That eye for the overlooked has carried her personal work into the Main Competition of the Warsaw International Poster Biennale, and onto stages at Forward Festival and the Intercontinental Biennale, with anthology credits including Bounty Hunters Posters, Slanted’s “Posters Can Help”, and Experimental Type 2.0. Poster Every Day regulars know her for “Bear with Me”, a life-sized bear built with Anna Ganna from 104 recycled Poster Every Day posters and roughly ten cubic metres of discarded plastic bottles, shown at Forward Festival Berlin in 2023. “This project isn’t just about recycling posters,” she said. “It’s about rethinking what we leave behind as designers.”

As a design leader she talks about separating ego from the brief and “structuring creative chaos” without losing the curious energy that makes early ideas good, which is what made her a subject of Design Week’s design/leader series, built around her habit of collecting road signage, care labels and IKEA manuals like other people collect stamps. “Creative Potential”, animated with Tanya Ermolaeva for the Bankov Poster School’s fifth-anniversary anthology on Times Square in June 2025, put the same eye on one of the world’s biggest screens.

Why we like it: her advice to younger designers is as spare as her posters, “strip it back and don’t over-process”, and she takes her own advice.

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