Describing himself as a “cultural chameleon,” Ron Tau, the founder and creative director of Toronto- and Beijing-based design firm Meat, believes design should bridge the familiar and the unfamiliar.

“A lot of times when we create things, we just fall into the trap of ‘Let’s just make something everyone can immediately understand,’ and that can sometimes make certain nuances and particular parts of culture get lost,” says Tau. “We like to vary subtle notes of communication and connect something we’re talking about to something you might not expect. When we’re working for, say, a chocolate brand, we might look at the tactics and visual language of street culture or sneaker culture; I think that’s interesting, because that creates conversation between different parts of what we experience in culture.”

Tau was born in Hong Kong and moved to Toronto at age ten. After graduating from York University’s graphic design program in 2009, he worked as a designer with Ogilvy & Mather Beijing before moving to JOYN:VISCOM, where he became senior art director, and then on to 2x4 Beijing.

Since launching Meat in 2016, he has brought on three staffers in Toronto and four in Beijing, where he spends about three months a year. Tapping into his bicultural background for inspiration has paid off for Tau. Meat’s clients in the culture, lifestyle, food, beverage and fashion spaces include a fascinating mix of scrappy startups; family-owned businesses; world-renowned film festivals; and monster brands like adidas, the NBA and Nike.

“I feel very privileged and lucky to be able to leverage and exercise my understanding and my experience with both parts of my culture,” he explains.

“I switch back and forth multiple times a day, whether conversing with a client in China, in Canada, in the States, in Australia or in the United Kingdom. Getting to access different parts of myself and relating to people with different sensibilities and a different feel of the world makes my experience really full.”

The studio’s work has been honored with many international awards, including the ADC, Applied Arts’s Design Award for Typography, the Asia Pacific Design 17 award for best branding, Communication Arts’s Award of Excellence for Typography, the Hiiibrand Awards, the RGD Ultrabold and the Tokyo TDC. In October, Meat was listed fifth in D&AD’s Top Design Agencies in North America.

Fixated on fonts

Meat’s work often shines the spotlight on typography, using fonts as a descriptive storytelling tool. Tau, who is a professional member of the New York Type Director’s Club, says he loves delving into the nerdy aspects of fonts and typesetting.

“You can think of fonts as the voice of information. It’s the cadence of human connection: the language gives form to what we want to say to each other,” he explains. “What’s interesting about typography is that sometimes, even if you can’t read the language, you can still get a sense of the cadence of how something is being said visually—very much like when you listen to a conversation in a language you do not speak, you can still pick up on the tone. I’m fascinated by that ability of language as form and as tone. Typography is the perfect vessel for that: it connects people and delivers information, but it’s also much more about how we’re talking to each other.”

For example, Meat recently took on a visual identity project for Building Narrative, an architecture studio based in both Hong Kong and Thailand. “What interested me in the project were the architects; they have a lot of investment into the history of the sites where their projects happened, how they preserve architecture and how they can transform a physical space into an archive of what’s happened before the site,” says Tau. “They do that with residential projects, hospitality projects and retail.

“The studio has a fantastic name,” he continues. “I used typography to set its name in a way that’s very immediate and upfront. But I wrote the letters in a way where every time I’m telling the story, I’m telling different parts of it. So, it’s a very literal representation of the idea that there are different ways we can talk about something; we can choose to highlight different things. And that reminds me of their archival approach, selecting what to preserve and what to communicate through a space. [It transcends] that visual and spatial rhythm.”

Concepts lead to connections

For Pangmei Desserts, a new Beijing restaurant, Meat wove a contemporary, playful aspect into the branding, which won a Yellow Pencil Award in 2025.

“This is an example of us communicating in a way that’s relevant to the subject matter but also giving it something unexpected by connecting it to other emotional cues and memories that might not be immediately obvious,” says Tau.

The restaurant serves traditional Chinese desserts—think glutinous rice balls, sticky rice and boba in dessert form—that have fallen out of favor with young consumers. So, Tau’s team gave these textures a glow-up by introducing inflated Heiti typography in nostalgic colors.

“People who grew up in Hong Kong or other parts of East Asia share similar memories of popular culture—things like video games, anime or cheap collectible toys that built off of these IPs of famous cartoons,” he explains. “So, I tied in the idea of Chinese desserts being very outdated and represented it in a language that evokes things we liked as kids—specifically the Japanese toy culture of gachapon, where you put a coin in [a vending machine] and get a plastic ball with a random blind-box toy. This project connects to memories and things that are not obviously connected to each other.”

For Popcorn for the People, a nonprofit popcorn brand in New Jersey that employs mostly adults with autism to fund programs and services, Meat sought inspiration from the actual people making the popcorn to transform the company’s staid visual identity.

“The original generic packaging didn’t communicate their mission or intention at all,” Tau recalls. “So, the first thing we talked about was how we would push the ‘popcorn for the people’ in a very visible, forward way where we could highlight the wonderful people working there.”

Meat created characters inspired by people making the popcorn. “There were specific hairstyles; outfit choices, like oversized headphones and checkered bags; overalls that someone always wore; certain types of glasses—peculiar details of the team members that we mixed into different characters,” explains Tau. “We put together all these little characteristics that they loved about each other and created characters based on the flavors, and the overall design language nods back to the classic vertical red-and-white striped popcorn package that we might have in our heads, like the emoji. Then, we applied that striped language as a carrying and unifying pattern, the background to which the characters would pop.”

To create the visual identity for the Aranya Film Festival, which takes place in a seaside town on the outskirts of Beijing, Meat took inspiration from the tides of the ocean to create the animated posters.

“The motion of the frames coming in and out gently evokes the coming and going of waves, and we created this framework system where the screens are interacting with each other,” explains Tau. “Sometimes, they might be the vessel where you type information in, and sometimes you would put bills of the films in the festival. It’s almost a metaphor for the waves of talent in the Chinese film industry that gather every year, that fluidity of people coming together through the medium of film.”

For Juztlab, a Shanghai-based supplement brand that recently picked up an Applied Arts award, Tau’s team transformed the look of the “deer pizzle” product made using ancient Chinese medicine formulas with aspirational contemporary packaging.

“Its hero product is basically a Chinese Viagra, so we designed the packaging in a way where it doesn’t carry that stigma but presents itself as a dignified, lifestyle- and fashion-forward product,” says Tau. “The packaging takes on a new cadence and visual character free from the stereotypical association of Chinese medicine; the visual cues resonate more with what we associate with credibility and science. This project is similar to a lot of my other projects in China, where I try to bridge something traditional with something more familiar using more international aesthetics and visual language.”

For Nike By You 2025, where consumers can choose their own designs for shoes, T-shirts, patches and pins, Meat drew a cast of furry training partners by hand.

“There was a yoga cat, a skateboarding cat, a running dog and a Frisbee dog. We tried to be authentic to the visual representation and illustration style of the animals,” says Tau. “One of the interesting conversations we had with Nike was about how to draw them so they were accurate to animal behavior: How would these animals do the sports if they were actually capable of doing that? It was funny how rigorous the client was, saying things like, ‘That’s how a cat would skateboard,’ or ‘That’s not how a dog would catch a frisbee.’”

Building bonds and shaping minds

Tau is also active in the design community: his work has been showcased at many design festivals, exhibitions and annual events, such as Asia-Pacific Design in China; CULTURESCAPES: Global Type in Basel, Switzerland; Tokyo Type Director’s Club; Typojanchi in Seoul, South Korea; and Visuelt in Oslo, Norway. He has also judged many design competitions, including the RGD Branding Awards, the TDC72 Competition and York University’s DESNathon.

For three years, Tau taught typography and graphic design at the Toronto-based George Brown School of Design and York University, where he wrote the typography program for first-year design students at York and became the course director.

“I love teaching because it allows me to practice working with a variety of fresh minds,” says Tau. “I’m a very project-driven teacher; I don’t give too many lectures. We do five-minute critiques with students, and it’s exciting because I have to understand a project, where a student is coming from and where they could be going. Then, I work with them to help them move forward, to discover their interest and their potential.”

Tau stopped teaching in September as he pursues his MFA at Yale University. A sought-after speaker, he has appeared at many design institutions, including the Central Academy of Fine Arts and the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing and York University in Toronto.

By using typography and design to explore meaning and emotion through layers of unexpected creativity, Meat’s work transcends typical branding techniques. For Tau, the joy is in finding common ground between the work, the client and the audience across cultures. ca