Back in the 20th century, there was a distinct difference between a design group and an ad agency. So distinct were they that, on many design programs, students would have to choose a design or advertising pathway, with boundaries firmly drawn between them. In 21st-century creative spaces, the boundaries are decidedly more blurred. And, at New York-based design studio DE-YAN, they’ve been blown out of the water.

As founder and chief executive officer Dejan Jovanovic sees it, DE-YAN is a creative enterprise that sits firmly between the two. “An agency often optimizes for decks and approvals; a studio optimizes for making,” he says. “We have the infrastructure of a large-scale agency but the mentality of a studio.”

If Jovanovic makes a distinction, it’s between what many people think DE-YAN does—experiential design—and what it actually is, which is a brand experience studio, something that “connects emotion to enterprise,” as he explains it. “[A brand experience studio] builds worlds that feel human, culturally relevant and measurable while moving the business forward in a meaningful way. Experiential design is often interpreted as a moment: An event. A physical installation. Something that happens, impresses and ends. Brand experience is much broader.”

Looking at the breadth of the studio’s output, it’s clear that its approach to brand experience is resonating with companies trying to balance interactivity, immersion and trust to meaningfully connect with consumers in an entertainment-saturated world. Its projects span a determinedly lo-fi and Clio-winning relaunch of the Talking Heads’s song “Psycho Killer,” the launch of Kourtney Kardashian’s LEMME line of vitamin and botanical supplements, and experiential retail projects for Meta. Other clients include Google, Alicia Keys, Lady Gaga, Louis Vuitton and Versace. For all of these, DE-YAN has created experiences rooted in a “starting position that asks, ‘What behavior are we trying to change?’ or ‘What should someone feel?’ rather than ‘How do we make this interactive?’” says Jovanovic.

The studio’s long-term relationship with Meta is a strong example of its successful approach. Brought in as strategic partners to define how the brand should physically position itself in retail, DE-YAN has collaborated in the development and execution of Meta’s entire IRL brand presence, including its first permanent retail store in Los Angeles, followed by stores in Las Vegas and New York, each filled with consumer wearables and cutting-edge technology.

“Working with DE-YAN feels less like a standard agency-client transaction and more like a true creative partnership,” says Lindsay Hegleman, director of global brand experiences at Meta. “What sets the studio apart is its rare ability to balance high-concept, innovative thinking with a process that is incredibly grounded and organized. The team approaches every interaction with genuine curiosity and a ‘yes, and’ attitude that makes even the most complex projects feel seamless and exciting.”

By contrast, the 50th anniversary re-release campaign of “Psycho Killer” for Warner couldn’t have been more down to earth. “It centered around an idea that began with a question: How could we re-create the feeling of that summer of 1975, when a local band played a catchy new song at CBGB that got stuck in your head and let a new generation feel what it was like when a hook takes over your brain, your neighborhood and then the world?” recalls Jovanovic. The answer, on a budget of just $23,000, lay in the creation of an “experience through an old-school music marketing playbook of wheatpaste, graffiti, stickers, radio station takeovers, Chinatown knockoffs, buskers on the F train… all repeating the famous fa fa fa fa hook,” as Jovanovic says.

More traditional experiential projects, such as B2B events, tentpole consumer activations, set design and art direction, play their part in DE-YAN’s portfolio too, such as the League of Legends World Championship 2024, created in partnership with the Done and Dusted production team, and the NBA 2K League All Star Weekend Event.

The breadth of projects is matched by a broad range of styles, aesthetics and content. Where does such breadth come from? “DE-YAN started from a very personal place,” says Jovanovic. “I grew up in Oberammergau, a small village in Bavaria, after my family immigrated from Serbia. Serbian culture gave me emotional intensity and resilience.

“Growing up in a family that had to rebuild and adapt across borders taught me resourcefulness; you learn to move quickly, to create opportunity and not wait for permission,” he adds, continuing: “A German upbringing gave me discipline and precision. Systems matter. Details matter. Execution matters. Being on time matters.

“And growing up between two languages shaped me in another way,” he continues. “I always knew there were two ways to answer something. Two cultural lenses. Two interpretations. Everything felt dual. That duality stayed with me. In problem-solving, I rarely believe there is only one path. There are always multiple angles to approach a challenge: Emotional and rational. Instinctive and structured.”

Oberammergau, where Jovanovic spent his formative years, is world-famous for its 400-year-old Passion Play held every ten years. I ask him if he thinks growing up steeped in its drama, theater and fervor has shaped him at all. “Yes, more than I realized at the time,” he says. “The Passion Play is essentially large-scale immersive theater, and I was part of one of the productions as a child. The entire town becomes the cast, the crew, the audience—it’s community on a massive scale. Growing up around that, you absorb something fundamental: Experience isn’t just something you watch. It’s something you enter. It has pacing. It has choreography. It has an emotional arc that moves people collectively.”

Having studied marketing and visual communications in Germany, Jovanovic moved to New York with the remains of a small $500 student loan and the urgent desire to work in creative. Persistence paid off, and he was given creative roles in various agencies, “where I learned how strong ideas were sold and how they were often diluted in execution, in a system that was slow, bloated and disconnected from that execution,” he recalls.

Wanting to create an agency that would not feel that disconnect, Jovanovic took the unusual decision to open a small studio in Serbia. What he envisaged was “a multidisciplinary playground for the most passionate talent,” he explains. “A place where strategy, design, technology, architecture and production lived under one roof. And importantly, a place where people who didn’t normally get access to global work could step into it and show off their talent.” From there, it scaled organically, with studios in Brazil, Canada, Los Angeles and New York City acting as “satellite hubs [for] support as the client base expanded,” Jovanovic continues. “It was demand meeting talent meeting belief, creating opportunity and proving that world-class taste isn’t defined by geography.”

Global hubs offer a multitude of advantages, the biggest being perspective, he believes. “Culture isn’t one-dimensional,” he says. “What feels relevant in New York reads differently in Los Angeles, differently in Europe [and] differently in the Middle East. Having teams across continents gives us a natural cultural calibration. That makes the work sharper and more globally fluent.”

It’s clear that the main factors driving Jovanovic, and by extension DE-YAN, are meaningful connectivity and trust—both with clients and with the clients’ clients. “We design for behavior, not demographics,” he says. “We define what someone should feel before we define what it looks like, then everything else—material, pacing, color, technology, content—supports that. Fit comes from cultural calibration. When something feels inevitable for that brand and that audience, the connection follows.”

For its work on Louis Vuitton X, the studio brought a colorful pizzazz and playfulness to what many would think of as a rather staid brand because “we identified a gap between Vuitton’s immense heritage and how younger audiences engage with culture,” says Jovanovic. Over two floors of the French fashion house’s Rodeo Drive building in Beverly Hills, DE-YAN helped display some 180 archival items in ten vibrant spaces. These ranged from a gallery of eye-popping contemporary artworks and classic LV designs reinterpreted by renowned creatives like Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Yayoi Kusama and Cindy Sherman. A pastel pop-up store featured pink palm trees under a domed yellow glass ceiling, the bright blue Los Angeles sky adding a natural luminosity to the space. “The opportunity wasn’t to modernize the brand but to reinterpret its history in a way that felt alive, immersive and culturally charged,” Jovanovic recalls. “The tonal shift was intentional. It wasn’t about objects in vitrines. It was about emotion, pacing, color and narrative rhythm. And it became the most visited exhibition in the brand’s history, laying the foundation for a traveling exhibition model.”

Much of DE-YAN’s experiential design integrates and utilizes emerging and fast-changing technologies, which can be hard for users to connect with emotionally and authentically. But Jovanovic is emphatic in his belief that authenticity and emotion are rooted in internal logic, which ensures that “the materials make sense, the narrative makes sense and the technology behaves in a believable way,” he says. “Even with CGI or advanced tech, we think about weight, texture and human pacing so it feels grounded. We start with a question: ‘What behavior are we trying to change?’ or ‘What should someone feel?’ Technology alone doesn’t blow people away anymore. Emotional clarity does. If the experience makes sense, if it feels coherent and if it serves a human need, then the innovation feels powerful rather than performative.”

Looking ahead, Jovanovic feels excited by the possibilities opening up in retail and brand communication and the impact of wearable technology on them. “Today, retail and brand communication are optimized for the phone,” he explains. “Displays are static. Advertising assumes you’re looking down. But if wearable tech becomes mainstream—whether Google glasses, Meta Ray-Ban, OpenAI devices or Snapchat Spectacles—retail becomes the canvas where digital and physical truly merge. Product displays won’t just sit on shelves. Spaces will hold invisible digital layers
that activate through wearables. The environment itself becomes responsive. Behavior shifts from scrolling to seeing.” And it’s clear that he feels DE-YAN is at the forefront of the possibilities and directions on offer—“leading the conversation,” as he says.

“Much has changed for the studio since its inception more than a decade ago, but what hasn’t changed is the ambition,” says Jovanovic. “DE-YAN today is really about codifying what used to live instinctively in a smaller team and turning it into a model that can grow globally while maintaining the same creative bar.” ca