Tobias van Schneider

Tobias van Schneider is a German multi-disciplinary maker of useful, curious and beautiful things. (he just doesn't like the word entrepreneur) Originally born in Germany, and raised in Austria, he now lives and works in New York City.

Tobias’ journey is a little different than most. He started his career by dropping out of high school at 15, and then made grand plans of becoming a software engineer. After realising he, quite frankly, sucked at it, Tobias began teaching himself design at the age of 16. Fast forward a few years and through a whole lot of ass-busting, Tobias is now a designer, founder, speaker, mentor and maker.

After opening his own design studio, Tobias had the honor to develop products and services in a wide range of categories for companies such as Red Bull, Google, BMW, Wacom, Sony, Fantasy Interactive, Stinkdigital, Toyota, Ralph Lauren, Bwin, to name a few.

As part of his quest for overachievement, Tobias has been honored with the net magazine Designer of the Year & Awwwards Art Director of the Year award. He also serves as a member on the Board of Directors at AIGA NYC and is supporter, advisor and mentor to a variety of programs around the world, including Cannes Lions, HyperIsland, Art Directors Club & the FWA.

For the past two and a half years, Tobias has helped building new products as Art Director & Lead Product Designer at Spotify in New York. During this time, Spotify grew from 15 million users to 70+ million, becoming the leading music streaming service in the world.

Tobias’ work has been published in highly acclaimed press such as FastCompany, Inc Magazine, net Magazine, Computer Arts, Wired, FirstRound Capital, BusinessInsider, Washington Post, TheNextWeb.

In his spare time Tobias is the co-founder of Semplice, a portfolio system and community used by thousands of the world’s leading designers who represent brands such as HUGE, BBDO, Tumblr, Disney, Apple, Firstborn, Unit9, R/GA and Razorfish. Since the launch, the Semplice has quickly grown into one of the leading portfolio systems for creatives.

In addition to his mentoring work, Tobias is advisor and creative director at memomi. He’s played a crucial role in creating the brand and overseeing the user experience to help establish the world’s first digital mirror software platform called Memory Mirror. Memomi aims to revolutionize the interactive shopping experience and recently launched with selected partners such as Intel, IBM, Sony and Panasonic.