Tobias van Schneider – The Creative Spirit at Spotify

The idea is your baby, it’s fragile and it needs you to protect it until it’s strong enough to survive other people attacks.

Tobias van Schneider

Tobias van Schneider has a pretty impressive résumé to boast about. He is the art director and lead product designer at music streaming service, Spotify. He was worked in the past with Red Bull, BMW, Google, Sony, Toyota, Ralph Lauren, and more.

He has also been featured in numerous publications, online and off, including Wired, Inc Magazine, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and many others.

Tobias is of German descent, but was raised in Austria and is now located in New York with his work for Spotify. He was recently awarded the Independent Designer of the Year award for his work in web design. Despite all of these achievements, he still feels like he hasn’t achieved anything, at least nothing big enough to make him stop working towards his goals. He is, however, proud of the fact that he is not yet bored of his work, and that he wakes up every morning excited to work on his next project.

He states that his daily routine at Spotify is never the same as the day before, and that’s one of the things he loves about working there. He has been working at the company for more than two years, and in this time it has tripled in size. The company and the work that he carries out is constantly changing, so he is always faced with new challenges. The large, diverse community of web designers in New York is also a highlight of the job, and he says there is a different design event taking place almost every day that he could attend to get new ideas, learn something new, or just discuss the industry with other passionate designers.

He is excited for the future of web design. He feels that the last couple of years have been spent adapting to new technologies, so a lot of what has been done in the industry has been quite repetitive.

Now that everyone is accustomed to these new technologies, web design can start to move in a more exciting direction. He is especially enthusiastic about the implementation of virtual reality in the web design community.

Tobias encourages us all to work on side projects outside of our day-to-day work, and that he always has something he is developing on the side, no matter how stupid it may seem. It certainly doesn’t seem like a stupid idea when you consider his success; Tobias also founded online portfolio building tool, Semplice, and is a member of the AIGA Board of Directors in New York.

Tobias van Schneider is certainly an inspirational office hero, deserving of the Independent Designer of the Year award, which he states is as much of an achievement for Spotify as it is for him.