Designer of the year: Joey Shimoda

Out of a loft in the city's Downtown Arts District, Shimoda leads a 10-person studio-Shimoda Design Group-that balances several projects at once, ranging from a large interior retrofit in Michigan to a new, ground-up creative office development in West L.A. When he founded his firm in 2000, he was one of the early adopters of a downtown neighborhood that is now filled with other designers, trendy restaurants and shops, as well as home to the Southern California Institute of Architecture. [...]because we spend so much time with that relationship, we tend to work with them over longer periods of time, helping them evolve through a collaborative conversation in terms of building their business."