Design direction, second opinions and other useful trouble

Sәlem! I’m Ilya Muravyëv, a design consultant and creative director from the White Hills of Qazaqstan, with nearly 25 years of hands-on practice across digital products, interfaces and visual culture.

These days, most of my attention goes into raising my baby, TheFashionDB. It grew out of a fairly simple frustration I’d been carrying since studying fashion history and theory at university: fashion still has no meaningful map of itself. Brands, designers, collections and events are usually documented as separate stories, while I see them as timelines that intersect until they form one enormous network across the industry.

That network is slowly but steadily taking shape. I am stubborn enough to believe it might become a useful contribution to civilisation. If you want to watch it grow, there is a mailing list, on the 5th of every month I send an update on what has changed.

Meanwhile

At ScoutWay, I work as creative director, turning the founders’ football-scouting expertise and product vision into something coherent, distinctive and usable, while also supporting the in-house product designer.

I also keep one foot in the PC.ST and Podcasts.ru multiverse, designing the occasional piece of visual communication whenever something extraordinary needs to go out into the world.

And when time allows, I take on independent design work of a more conversational kind: second opinions, difficult project questions, portfolio reviews and mentoring for people who need another experienced pair of eyes.

In previous seasons: World Chess and FIDE Online Arena, Deloitte, Samsung, Perfetti van Melle, a handful of startups and naturally the global lollipop economy.

Why?

What runs through almost everything I do is a need to find things, understand how they connect, and then reveal a pattern no one expected to see.

Growing up in the 80s and 90s — basically BC — that mostly meant libraries. Then the early Internet arrived and turned it into something closer to a permanent condition: obscure references, forgotten pages, catalogues, fragments and things that seemed to exist only because somebody had gone looking for them.

J. L. Borges eventually gave me a better vocabulary for it. I still think of that early-web period as my Tlön era, full of little hrönir artefacts waiting to become real the moment somebody searched for them.

That instinct eventually became useful professionally. I tend to keep digging until a messy problem turns into a structure I can actually see: how a product behaves, how a visual system holds together, how a brand evolved, how one timeline intersects another. I am equally happy staring at a typographic detail for twenty minutes or stepping far enough back to question the whole thing.

TheFashionDB is probably where that trained neural network of mine has become most literal so far.

Currently in RAM

At the moment and in no particular order:

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Updated: 20 August 2026

This updates whenever something new and exciting comes along, occupies my head for a while, and feels like it'll eventually earn a place in long-term memory.