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Its fairly easy to work out who designed/was part of the team that designed a kit. Lots of the studio sculptors are on Instagram, and will often say around pre-order or release date that they designed a kit.

Some of the Eavy Metal painters are on there as well, and will say which models they painted.

Ah, the 6 monthly thread of "ooo, eee, ahhh, aren't my favourite games company doing awesome".
Clearly charging far too much to make that much profit. Sigh.

I don't buy the blanket anonymisation for the safety of creatives explanation for one second. MTG credits artists, video games can do it (when a company is not using "removal from the credits" as a cudgel to keep workers in line), movies too. Essentially every major entertainment industry does.

Those are all also much bigger industries than GW that are also highly collaborative when it comes to the process. They also have that type of obsessed fans that GW has in numbers that dwarf GW. If somebody wanted to stay anonymous then that should be their decisions (see solutions like Alan Smithee for movie directors), not GW's, when it comes to credits.

I don't quite know why GW doesn't credit picture artists anymore, and it does seem like they credit them significantly less than they used to. My 1988 Adeptus Titanicus has a comprehensive list of illustrators, although not on a per-image basis, while my 2002 Codex Daemonhunters has no artist credits. But the anonymity argument is specifically for rules, isn't it? MTG doesn't credit rules writers to my knowledge, and in any case I don't think MTG players get quite as angry when a new card comes out that is bad. I definitely think some video game players would be upset if they could pin gameplay changes in popular mass market games on specific persons. I still see people on social media speculate on who wrote which codexes, creating theories about there being an "A-team" and the "B-team", and being legitimately angry about bad codexes, so if codexes were still strongly identified with specific authors, I'm pretty sure some personal problems could arise. The thing is that it does not take that many lunatics in order to be intolerable - only one person out of a thousand needs to take a piss in the soup before I'm not interested in having any.

Regarding miniatures, I suspect the design process is so collaborative and distributed that it is often difficult to pin down a single artist. Probably you have someone come up with the concept and general pose, someone doing some details, someone else doing others, maybe someone doing adjustments for ease of production, etc. Perhaps some small models are done completely by individuals, while larger models are team efforts, and it ends up being quite a hassle figuring out how to assign individual credit. It's not like in the old days where a Perry twin, or someone like Aly Morrison or Trish Carden, would often scult a miniature (or entire range) all on their own in greenstuff.

For space marines, it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of them start of a base model and adjusted.

 Apple fox wrote:
For space marines, it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of them start of a base model and adjusted.

Yeah that has been done single the early days. And not just with space marines. More than one name as designers would often be stated on kit boxes, WD articles and Forgeworld catalogues.

Their newest artwork still looks like something AI would generate, so bleh.