It's all about the bigger picture

Okay so picture this. Thousands of Rubik's cubes. A spreadsheet. Two slightly sleep-deprived people on a mission. And somewhere at the end of all of that, a portrait so good it makes people stop mid-conversation and just stare.

That is cube portrait art. And I am completely, unapologetically obsessed with it.

Here is how it works. You take a photograph, any face, any subject, and you reduce it to exactly six colours. Not because six is a nice round number. Because that is all a Rubik's cube gives you. White, yellow, orange, red, blue, green. That is your palette. The whole thing. You then map that image onto a grid where every single cell is one physical cube. There is pixel math involved. There are spreadsheets. At some point you will stare at a cluster of yellow pixels and genuinely debate whether that reads as a cheekbone or just chaos. This is normal. Push through.

Then comes the physical build. And honestly, this is my favourite part of anything I do.

Cube by cube. Row by row. You pick one up, twist it to the configuration the grid says it needs to be, place it, pick up the next one. And here is the wild thing: you stop thinking about cubes almost immediately. Every single move feels like you are solving the picture. Not the puzzle. The picture. It is meditative in the most unexpected way. Deeply satisfying. Also genuinely hard work, your hands know about it the next morning.

There is always this phase in the middle where it looks like absolutely nothing. Just a sea of coloured squares. Pure geometry, zero meaning. You are tired, you are squinting, and you are thinking "what are we even building here."

And then it happens. Gradually, then all at once. A jaw. A cheekbone. Sunglasses. A smile. And suddenly you are looking at a face and going: wait. WAIT. We actually did this.

Our last project was a portrait of Bill McDermott, ServiceNow's CEO, built for a company Design Summit where purpose was the theme. The choice of subject was not difficult. Sujana from engineering and I took it on together. She brought the cube experience, I brought mine, and we both brought the slightly unhinged commitment this kind of thing requires. The design programme team had the vision. We had the hands.

When Amy, SN's Design CXO, inaugurated it with CJ Desai in the room, and the portrait was uncovered for the first time, the room did exactly what you hope a room does.

Jaws. Dropped.

That three-second reaction is what the whole thing is for. Every hour of pixel math, every twisted cube, every "I cannot believe how many of these there are" moment, it all lives in those three seconds.

If this sounds like your kind of madness and you want to learn how to do it yourself, come find me. I would love to show you the whole process, digital to physical, spreadsheet to portrait.

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