Asher Hyde Cohen, professionally known as Asher Hyde (@asherhyde on Instagram), began his career in graphic design out of his New Jersey bedroom during the 2020 lockdown. But long before the pandemic gave him time to fill, Hyde was already building his future.
From beginning his career working with digital artist Jeff Cole and self-entrepreneur Mark Brazil at the art company IKONICK, to posting viral original design concepts on his own social platforms using artificial intelligence and Photoshop and assisting on “reactive” creative projects with Nike, Hyde is paving the future of what graphic design and storytelling look like for brands and athletes that want to be part of real-time culture moments.
As early as middle school, Hyde described being drawn to Minecraft as a kid purely for the ability to construct his own worlds. He later gravitated toward Fortnite’s creative-building mode when it launched in 2018, preferring it even to the game’s core shooting mechanics. He’d also print and customize his own clothing designs for fun, years before he had any framework for it as a career path.
Hyde also said he used to make YouTube videos and found he liked making the thumbnail graphics far more than editing the videos themselves. That interest pushed him toward making cover art for the basketball video game NBA2K, which he posted on Instagram with no real goal beyond wanting people to see it.
As his following grew, he began cold-messaging other young designers to collaborate, sometimes 15 to 25 people a day, well before Instagram had a formal collaboration feature. He collaborated with kids as far as Ukraine and Serbia over text, purely for mutual audience exposure.
Hyde was candid that no agenda drove him, saying pure instinct and passion shaped these graphics. He credits his willingness to reach out constantly to being 14 years old and having nothing to lose, the absence of an ego that could be bruised by rejection.
One of those daily cold messages went to Jeff Cole (@cole on Instagram), who had between 700,000 and 800,000 followers at the time. Hyde never expected a response.
“I literally said, ‘Wanna collab?’” Hyde said. “I never expected him to answer. And for whatever reason, he answered in, like, an hour.”
The next day they were on a Zoom call. Cole and his co-founder, Mark Brazil, of the art company IKONICK, then based in Arizona, spent the first few minutes laughing in disbelief that Asher was only 14 because they’d assumed he was in his twenties.
They offered him an internship on the spot.
That internship grew into a paid role, and Hyde’s responsibilities expanded as IKONICK itself grew from canvas art into apparel, and eventually into licensed work for major brands: Hasbro and Upper Deck, producing artwork for Michael Jordan, LeBron James and Tiger Woods.
Hyde, only a teenager, flew out to Arizona to visit Cole and Brazil, and was brought into major industry meetings, including once at NBA league headquarters in Manhattan.
“They were like, ‘You’re the youngest person probably ever in this building that’s not an athlete,’” Hyde said.
Cole and Brazil lived together at the time in what Hyde described as “what felt like a mansion in the mountains” in Arizona. Hyde watched their whole personal and professional evolution unfold, and they watched his too.
During and after his time at IKONIK, working on licensed intellectual property taught him to separate his ego from his output, something he says he is still working on.
“It’s something I still struggle with in terms of getting feedback,” Hyde said. “Sometimes when working with companies it might even come off a little rude because it was over text or email. And you just have to learn that it’s never personal.”
He noted that even Cole, an experienced pro, would get tough notes from clients, which normalized the process for Asher as simply “the business.”
Hyde said he worked constantly during class in high school, but was careful to stay visibly engaged so teachers wouldn’t assume he was slacking.
“I had this unspoken written deal with my teacher where it was like, ‘I’ll participate in the class to the point where they’re like, ‘No, no, no, not you, Asher, we’re going to call in someone else,’ and I knew then they would be okay with me being on my computer,” he said.
He also connected the work to social avoidance.
“I was a little socially awkward in high school,” Hyde said. “So for me, it was a nice escape to be able to stay in on a Saturday night and kind of do work ... That was comfortable for me at the time.”
By senior year of high school, IKONICK thought of giving Hyde a full-time position and encouraged him to forgo college.
“They wanted me to not go to school to work fully for them,” Hyde said. “They believed in me more than I believed in myself ... But also, I cannot lie, telling 17-year-old me that I was too good for college, my ego loved that.”
Despite the fact that Hyde wanted to skip college and work full-time, his parents insisted he at least apply. His mom, Sheryl, took an unusually hands-on role, scheduling time with Hyde to help him complete his college applications, a process that eventually landed him at USC.
“When I told them I didn’t want to go, they were like, ‘No way,’” Hyde said. “They said, ‘It doesn’t matter about the school. It doesn’t matter about the money. I don’t care if they offer you half a million dollars’ ... they were like, ‘You have to socialize. You have a lot of maturing to do. You have to live with kids your age.’”
Looking back two years later, Hyde said his mom was “1,000% right.”
Hyde worked for IKONICK through the summer before college and into the first half of his freshman year fall, then stepped back to “really experience college.” Cole and Brazil weren’t surprised, and they were supportive.
“They’re like big brothers in the way,” Hyde said. “I remember crying when it ended. I was sad, but they were really sweet. They said, ‘This is best for you. You’re in college now. Go enjoy life.’”
Around this time, Cole’s own trajectory illustrates the larger industry shift Hyde is now riding: Cole posted a real and AI-image hybrid edit of Lionel Messi, timed to Messi’s move to Miami, that went viral. Adidas, unable to arrange a real photo shoot with Messi, licensed Cole’s image for its campaign and hired him as creative director for the project.
“That was all from an Instagram post, which was created from a mix of AI and artificial resources,” Hyde said. “Photoshop’s also artificial, you know? It’s fake.”
The summer after freshman year, Hyde began posting under his own name and landed his own inbound deals. He’s honest that it was harder without anyone checking his work.
“There were times I felt like I didn’t deliver,” Hyde said. That pressure caught up with him, and he didn’t post at all during the first semester of sophomore year. According to Hyde, he became obsessed with being perfect, and that stopped him from posting.
“I regret it,” Hyde said.
Hyde describes a two-stage emotional cycle after a post takes off. First comes “the high,” when for roughly a week he feels great because he’s doing interviews and seeing his work reposted everywhere. Then comes the crash: the following week feels terrible, he said, because he begins pressuring himself to recreate that success. He described struggling to get out of bed and feeling the weight of the new expectation.
According to Hyde, he sees creative work as an exercise for handling those emotional highs, crashes and expectations, skills he believes can carry into “any aspect of my life ... I don’t know, like being a dad one day.”
Hyde began experimenting with AI as he was working his way back into posting. AI’s main use for him isn’t shortcutting the creative process, but rather lowering the psychological barrier to actually posting.
“AI just helps me get rid of that fear of posting, because I can create more,” Hyde said. “If the output’s more, then I’m going to post more. The only way to get over the fear of posting... is just posting.”
Careful to clarify that he never posts raw AI output, Hyde explained that every piece goes through heavy Photoshop work to fix proportions and remove “slop,” meaning garbled text and distorted faces, and add his own text and collage treatment.
“I always try to add text to things and collage it in that way,” Hyde said. “With AI, you’re always going to get disproportionate [results] ... I have to spend a lot of time in Photoshop fixing all those things.”
Hyde said he has only found success when he posts something he personally thinks is cool, taking other people’s opinions out of the equation entirely. He describes labeling his work as “conceptual” and “not affiliated” with the brands depicted, rather than explicitly disclosing AI use, and acknowledges this invites some criticism.
Hyde doesn’t engage with negative comments and tries to stay unemotional. His mom, however, he said, takes it harder than he does, especially when people repost his work without crediting him.
“I’m actually happy to get the comment even if it’s negative,” Hyde said, “because it does push it forward in the algorithm, I think.”
A moment Hyde vividly described was in spring 2026, when rookie phenom Victor Wembanyama and the San Antonio Spurs won a decisive Game 7 over the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference Finals, sending San Antonio to the NBA Finals for the first time since 2014.
Within about an hour of the final buzzer, Hyde had posted a mock Nike campaign concept reacting to the moment, built using AI plus roughly three hours of Photoshop work done live during the game. It hit an estimated 150 million views across platforms, with many assuming it was a real Nike campaign.
“All the magic, if you could say, of the post was just the fact that I was able to take the concept to reality within an hour,” Hyde said. “People thought that it was Nike, and they were impressed that Nike was able to post so quickly, but it was actually me.”
That post led directly to him working with Nike over the summer on what he calls “reactive” creative projects, fast-turnaround concept work responding to unpredictable live sports and culture moments. It’s a category, Hyde says, that extends to pop culture and even politics, comparing it to editorial cartooning.
“In sports, you can’t predict [what will happen],” Hyde said. “A moment happens that you might find cool, and instead of tweeting about it, your opinion, you can make an artwork about it.”
Hyde’s longer-term goal is a clothing brand called Hyde, currently only an LLC and an Instagram handle. He’s building it solo by design, because he wants to personally understand every function of the business before delegating.
“I don’t want to take shortcuts,” Hyde said. “How could I even talk through or delegate tasks to a team I will eventually bring on to get the right output when I don’t even know what I’m talking about yet?”
Hyde’s brand positioning is quiet-luxury basics and blanks, built around storytelling rather than loud streetwear design. Hyde said that even though he appreciates cool fashion, he personally only wears plain, blank shirts.
“My challenge is, how do you do something that’s been done a million times before, which is called quiet luxury?” Hyde said. “How do you build a world and tell a story that people buy into? That’s the game.”
Hyde found a lot of inspiration in the annual Kith x New York Knicks collaboration, which he calls one of the most inspiring creative projects he knows of. This campaign in particular was notable to him because even a brand with “hundreds of people” working on it visibly improves the collection year after year.
“The collection now is 100 times better than the one in 2022,” Hyde said. “If they have hundreds of people working on all these things, and there’s a lot of growth ... then mine can’t be [perfect] either.”
With the same mindset he had when he was 14, he cold-reached out to Kith founder Ronnie Fieg and, according to Hyde, was invited into the office for a tour, where Fieg answered every “dumb” question he had.
A philosophy that has been core to Hyde’s design work since his earliest days at IKONICK is prioritizing foundation and craft over speed to money.
“I don’t need to be a 22-year-old millionaire,” Hyde said. “I actually want to do it the right way and feel secure about it.”
That philosophy, Hyde said, comes down to being detached from the outcome while still wanting it more than anything in the world.
“I do want a post of one of my designs to go viral, and will do everything to make the post as good as possible,” Hyde said. “But at the end of the day, I can’t control it, and I have to be detached. It’s kind of like that yin and yang.”
It’s a connection Hyde says he’d never made out loud until this interview: that his love of computers, visual work and building things has been the same thread running underneath everything, from Minecraft to NBA2K covers to Hyde.
“It is authentic to me,” he said, pausing. “I got to write that one down. I never thought of that.”
Edited by Camille Culbertson and Sammie Yen