About — Rafe Johnson

Hey, I'm Rafe. Designer and technical artist. Right now I'm at Tolan, a $60M-backed startup in San Francisco, working as Technical Artist & Art Director on an alien best friend that millions of people talk to.

I've gotten to work on some strange things over the last eight years. At Seymourpowell I helped design Virgin Galactic's spaceship cabin — we built it as a digital twin in VR, so teams around the world could literally stand inside the ship while making decisions. That one won Red Dot's Best of the Best. Then I joined Liquid City, Keiichi Matsuda's studio, making AI characters with Niantic and Meta: Wol, a talking owl that picked up a Webby and a Lovie, and Wisp, a little forest spirit we shipped in Vision Pro's first year.

The mix has stayed the same the whole way through: art, tech, and nature, and trying to make things feel alive. On the side I build my own companions — Vega and Enso — mostly because I can't help myself.

8 years · 3 studios · 1 spaceship · millions of alien friends