Tania Yakunova’s Social Sampler for 5280 Magazine

How do you illustrate a list? 5280’s feature on Denver’s 36 best “third places” poses the problem at scale. Tania Yakunova’s answer is in the structure of the composition. She builds a grid, then lifts one woman out of it entirely, positioning her as a guide threading us from vignette to vignette.

The panels depict what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg called “third places,” informal gathering spots outside home and work. But they share edges unevenly, activities overlapping into one another, so that a volleyball game, a coffee shop, a park picnic, and an embroidery circle all feel like one emotional world. The effect is less “36 things to do” and more one city, experienced as a continuous social fabric.

Yakunova is a Ukrainian illustrator now based in London, self-taught with a sociology degree — a background that may explain her comfort illustrating social infrastructure rather than simply depicting activities. Her forms are rounded and geometric, faces reduced to minimal features. Bodies are chunky and warm, their proportions slightly toy-like, which flattens demographic difference without erasing it. Figures occupy impossible positions relative to one another, but the color unity makes it feel inviting rather than surreal. The style sits in a lineage of Eastern European poster design filtered through contemporary editorial flatness, and she cites Magritte and early twentieth-century avant-garde as primary influences, though the spatial play feels less indebted to Surrealism than to the organizational logic of community itself, where people share space without sharing context.

Her client list includes Apple, Google, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Die Zeit, Penguin Random House, and Coca-Cola. She is a World Illustration Award winner with additional recognition from Communication Arts and SILA, and teaches illustration through Domestika.