How did you discover you wanted to be a designer and get started in the field? For the longest time, my favorite class in school was English. I thought it was because I enjoyed reading and writing stories, but when the time came to learn typing and word processing, I realized that I loved picking out fonts and curating clip art to accompany my essays. That took me down a multiyear rabbit hole where I discovered dafont.com, learned Photoshop by lurking on graphic design forums, designed themes and skins for blogs, made posters for my high school’s theater club, and eventually was lucky enough to study communication design at Parsons School of Design in New York. I was intimidated because I had no formal art education prior to college, but the program’s environment fostered the discipline and encouragement I needed to finally start pursuing a creative career in earnest.

You have quite the storied background, moving from Singapore to New York City and working at several high-profile firms like COLLINS, Pentagram and SYPartners. Would you say these experiences impacted your creative approach? The years I spent at those firms were very formative. I’m immensely grateful to everyone who took a chance on me and went out of their way to show me the ropes. I got to see how design showed up at different degrees of depth and integration within each company, and this fostered in me a curiosity about the role of design in a larger ecosystem of commerce and culture.

My time at design-led places also gave me an appetite for wanting to understand brand strategy. I wasn’t exactly sure what the term meant back then, but it often felt like some serious groundwork related to business challenges needed to be addressed before we embarked on design explorations. I wanted to get in on that action. In an age where there are too many brands and products, I wanted to shape the decisions that came prior to a project waiting to be branded and beautified. This led me to pursue an opportunity as a senior designer at brand consultancy Redscout’s New York office, where I’ve come to understand how much of a brand’s success is determined by how well it communicates its brand strategy through creative means. All this eventually shaped how I approached building a design practice within the consultancy.

What do you do in your current role as head of design at Redscout? What are Redscout’s specializations, and what are your typical clients like? My favorite Redscout projects are interdisciplinary from start to finish and make a tangible impact in the world. We don’t have a typical kind of client, but what they often have in common is that they find themselves at a point where the status quo is not enough. For example, Sound Drinks, the makers of a sparkling botanical water, was moved to action when the pandemic had impacted its core business of providing beverages to corporate offices. We worked with it to strengthen its brand presence to compete on shelf in retail. Similarly, Lands’ End, a heritage brand that had lost relevance after spinning off from Sears, came to us to reset its brand and business fundamentals and reclaim what once made it unique. Through our diverse range of clients, I get a window into lives and cultures that I would otherwise never have experienced, and my world has opened up so much more.

In my day-to-day, I’m trying to find answers to questions such as the following: How do we work better together? What are our clients’ business challenges? What patterns are emerging? What’s a new tool we should experiment with? What was that typeface we were using in Round Two? Whose voice is missing from this room? Who is ready for more responsibility? Which direction are we recommending? How can we make our work stickier and more impactful? Who should we collaborate with next? What did we learn?

One Redscout project that caught my interest was your work for the Seattle-based women’s soccer team Reign FC. What was it like to work on a brand in the sports arena and develop a campaign for it? It was fascinating to work in a category with such distinct tropes and conventions, with timelines dictated by milestones coming at light speed in the sporting calendar. I found it a real treat to be immersed in a world that was new to me—touring the club’s locker rooms, meeting spaces and training grounds. A highlight of this work was staging a media day photoshoot on an unused floor in the corporate offices, capturing shots of all 26 players in collaboration with Studio Black Locust, our photography and set design partner. This shoot established a brand new look and feel for the team, presenting the players in a new, regal light that showcased unity and pride.

As the Reign was still in the process of building out their in-house capabilities, we embedded ourselves deeply within their team and were faced with the challenge of making as many outputs as possible within short notice—everything from social templates to stadium graphics and an OOH campaign in preparation for the 2025 season. Match-day graphics needed to be made in swift response to information coming in in real time, so our brand identity had to allow for quick implementation in a variety of formats and scenarios.

My favorite part of the work was seeing the Reign in-house designers begin to interpret and build upon the design system we had developed. Rob Stanton, Reign FC’s design director, was a close conspirator in ensuring that the new identity was internalized and implemented to the highest standards. Today, it’s a thrill to wake up every morning and see what new content the design team has put into the world. It was also truly special to see fans raise the scarves we designed at every match. I came away with a newfound appreciation for the power of fandom in bringing people together. Getting to know Reign FC so intimately made me root wholeheartedly for more people in the world—what a wonderful feeling that is!

What have been some of your other favorite branding projects you’ve worked on? How did they change your perception of what you can achieve through design? Our relationship with Quest Diagnostics comes to mind. The initial assignment was to design its consumer-facing brand based on its enterprise entity. Over a period of two years, we ended up designing a system that extended from a logo and sonic branding all the way to redesigning every touchpoint in its at-home testing experience.

Quest was in the process of rolling out at-home kits that could test for a variety of conditions, ranging from colorectal screening to fertility. We rewrote the instructions that came from the manufacturers to make them easier to understand, and we commissioned illustrator Reece Parker to redraw the diagrams and make them look simpler and more approachable.

This proved to be an extremely complicated endeavor that required the collaboration and sign off from legal, medical and compliance teams at Quest, but it was immensely gratifying to see the increase in the rates of successful completion of these important tests. It’s not exactly saving lives, but it’s as close as I could get as a designer.

Are there are any special considerations when it comes to developing brands that set it apart from other design disciplines? Brand building is trust building. It’s a process that requires a significant amount of time before seeing returns. This means that I must show up with a combination of ambition to orient a brand towards the future and empathy to meet them where they are today. This bridge-building exercise often requires a lot of different people to unite and take a creative leap together.

One of my favorite parts of brand development is when I get to meet my audience face-to-face. I’ve often heard designers turn up their noses on focus groups or declare that they’d never allow their work to go through any sort of testing—otherwise, the results would taint the integrity of their vision. I find it quite a motivating and humbling experience to be able to hear firsthand from a brand’s current or potential customer. I love knowing that I’m designing for a real person and not an imaginary archetype. Because of that, my creative approach is tailored to each client with their own unique needs and challenges.

What emerging technology will change the way you approach design in the future? Unfortunately, as our society continues to prioritize growth at all costs, our jobs are going to demand even more of us. We’ll have less time and fewer resources: creativity will continue to be commoditized, and our growing reliance on AI will become an inevitable tactic for survival.

I am not immune to the magic of a machine that spits out high-fidelity mockups in minutes—among many other things!—nor do I believe in sticking my head in the sand about this situation. However, it’s hard to be wholeheartedly enthusiastic when we see livelihoods continue to get eliminated at scale and artistic theft go unresolved. All of this makes me want to pay extra attention and get existential about what it means to be human. I take the rise of AI as an invitation to ask: How can I inject more of my values and character into my creative process? How can I embrace my limitations as a creative constraint? What is a story only I can tell?

Do you have any advice for designers starting out in the field today? This might sound a little woo-woo, but I’d say to them: Drop everything and heed the call of inspiration when it strikes—no matter how inconvenient it may be—before you forget or overthink it out of existence. In a world full of chaos and distractions, it feels so much easier to consume than to create. I marvel at how an idea can cut through the brain rot and make its way to my minds’ eye, and now I think of it as a reminder from the universe to be curious and not let inertia or self-doubt get in the way.

Sure, not all ideas are worthy of materialization, but there’s value in simply striving to be prolific when you’re first starting out. As it’s often said, “The more you practice, the luckier you get.” I think we need all the luck we can get these days. ca