SINCE 2026
Cursor
Designer @ Cursor
- No-code & Design Engineering
- Brand Systems at Scale
- Design Measured in Outcomes
- Lifting Young Creatives
Brand Designer · Cursor · Toil Studio
Monish Khara
The brand designer who ships the production build himself.
Monish Khara designs brand and web at Cursor, the company behind the AI code editor, having arrived through its acquisition of Graphite. Across a decade he moved from award-winning advertising art direction at Cummins&Partners through brand-systems work at Team and Combo© to co-founding Toil Studio, where he shipped high-performing web for Dell, Amazon, and Google on a no-code stack. On the side he runs Grafik Paragraph, a newsletter interviewing creatives from Koto, Collins, and Wolff Olins, and mentors young designers at Scope of Work and the New Museum.
- $1.7B+Dell investments surfaced in his redesign
- $560MBain Capital Crypto fund he branded
- 500K+Thesis starter kits sold
- $30K+Raised for charity — Koalas in NYC
HAPPENING NOW
STANDING TODAY
SINCE 2025
Graphite
Designer (Acq by Cursor)
HOW THEY THINK4 BELIEFS
Four convictions run under a decade of brand-and-web work.
THE IMPACT
The work, pulled out — brands you know and the numbers behind them.
EVERYTHING ELSE · 7 WORKS
THE TIMELINE
A steady climb up the ownership stack — from ad campaigns to the production build.
The whole record, newest first – tap any moment and Aster tells the story.
2025–PRESENT
Designing the tools that build software
In August 2025 Monish joined Graphite as a designer; when Cursor acquired the developer-tools startup, he moved into Cursor directly, taking the public title "Design @ Cursor" in January 2026. It is his first in-house product role after a decade of client services — the same brand-and-web sensibility, now aimed at the software engineers who use the product every day.
2023–2024
Founding a studio for ambitious brands
In December 2023 Monish co-founded Toil Studio as Cofounder and Web Design Lead, productizing his own method — no-code plus design engineering — into a studio practice. On a Webflow, Relume, and Figma stack he shipped high-performing web for Dell Technologies, Google Androidify, and Amazon Fire TV, and founded the Grafik Paragraph newsletter.
“At Toil Studio, we partnered with ambitious brands looking to scale, creating high-performing web experiences.”
2021–2022
From art direction to brand systems on the web
At Team (2021–2022) Monish moved from campaign art direction into shipping real websites: the brand system and website for Bain Capital Crypto's $560M fund, the Hyundai Artlab editorial site, and typography-led touchpoints for Pfizer. This is where he learned to build in Webflow and tie brand work to a live, responsive result — the muscle his Thesis customer-journey work would later put to commercial use.
2014–2020
Craft foundations in advertising
Monish earned a BA in Graphic Design with an industrial-design minor at Swinburne University of Technology (2014–2018), then joined Cummins&Partners NYC — Mumbrella's Agency of the Year — in December 2018. There he art-directed luxury-hotel campaigns across Marriott's Sheraton, St Regis, Westin, and W, and helped make Koalas in NYC, which won at the Shorty Awards and Adweek and raised $30K+ for charity.