Tyrone Ohia, Crane Foundation Design Laureate 2026

Tyrone Ohia (Ngāti Pūkenga, Ngāi Te Rangi) has been named this year’s Laureate for Design by The Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi.

Tyrone is the founder and creative director of Extended Whānau, the Tāmaki Makaurau studio he started after working at a number of Aotearoa’s leading design firms. The studio’s name is more than a slogan. It describes how he works. Tyrone believes good design is a collective effort, and the work proves it. Books, exhibitions, identities and campaigns that put mātauranga and toi Māori at the centre, not the margins.

You will know the work even if you don’t know the name. The identity for Toi Tū Toi Ora at Auckland Art Gallery. Whānau Mārama, the Matariki celebration at Commercial Bay. The national design identity for Matariki itself. Ōtairongo with Maree Sheehan. Each one carries te ao Māori with clarity and confidence, and none of them could have come from anywhere else.

The books are where much of his reputation was made. Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art won Best Book, Best Illustrated Book and Best Typography at the 2023 PANZ Book Design Awards. Then came Rewi: Āta haere, kia tere, the book on the late architect Rewi Thompson. Tyrone set aside the usual architecture monograph and made a portrait of the man instead. Rewi’s own handwritten name is screenprinted in fluoro pink across a bright blue cover, a nod to the pink highlighters he always worked with. The book is wrapped in natural cloth and printed on warm cream stock. Over 450 pages, Rewi’s handwriting and sketches run loose against strict, structured typesetting. The book reads like the man, rigorous and generous at once. It won a Type Directors Club award, and its colours went on to fill the walls of Objectspace for the KOHA exhibition.

His standing goes well beyond these shores. Tyrone sat on the D&AD Graphic Design jury in 2024. He is also the first Māori designer to be admitted to Alliance Graphique Internationale, the most exclusive membership in graphic design.

At home he sits on the board of Objectspace and continues to shape how Aotearoa sees itself, one identity, one book, one letterform at a time.

We like designers who understand that the subject comes first. The Rewi book could easily have been a handsome architecture tome. Instead, Tyrone found the man in the archive, in his handwriting, his highlighters and his colours, and he built everything around that. It is the same thing a good tailor does. You don’t start with the cloth, you start with the person wearing it.

We like work that belongs to a place. Tyrone has never treated Māori design as decoration or a reference to borrow. In his hands it is a contemporary visual language, current and unapologetic, built to stand next to anything in the world. The AGI and the TDC have recognised that. More importantly, so has the public, who now see his work on Matariki every winter.

We like people who bring others with them. Extended Whānau is a studio built around shared authorship, with artists, writers, iwi and clients all part of the work. The success is collective, and so is the credit.

And we like detail. Good type is built letter by letter, space by space, and nobody notices when it is right. Tyrone’s attention to that level of craft is the same thing we value in a well-made jacket. It is the part that most people never see, and it is the part that matters most.

The Laureate exists to recognise design that challenges convention and enriches this country. Tyrone has done both, quietly and consistently, for years.

Ka nui te mihi, Tyrone. Congratulations.