Clean Is Easy. Clean with a Heartbeat Is the Work.
My full jury interview for Shanghai's NewOne Awards 创立于上海 , on ECAL, Soulful Clarity, and what design education needs next.
Earlier this year, Lu Junyi of the NewOne Awards sent me these interview questions after I served on the jury. NewOne is a competition founded in Shanghai that documents and celebrates outstanding graduation work in visual communication, from Chinese design schools and beyond. Answering turned into an unexpected look back: my education, my teachers, my philosophy, and what I think design education needs next. Here is the full conversation.
This is a long interview! The email might be cut off, so just click on the title to read the full version.
Could you introduce your educational background? Which teachers or mentors had the greatest influence on you during your time as a student?
I studied communication design at ECAL, the University of Art and Design in Lausanne, Switzerland, from 2008 to 2011. It was a phenomenal experience. It’s a while back now, but I went back to give a talk there a few years ago, and everything felt exactly the same as when I studied there, which honestly made me really happy to see. Not because nothing should ever change, but because what ECAL teaches barely ages: it teaches you how to think and how to make, not which tools to use.
ECAL was a rigorous training ground: a deep focus on craft, and a real respect for typography. The unofficial mission was to make you ready for the real world, and it worked. You go through this bootcamp, and afterwards not much can shock you anymore. I want to be honest, though: it was hard, and not all of the hardness was necessary. There were consultations that sometimes crushed me quite a bit, and I remember asking my journal why fear seemed to be the engine. I’m grateful for the rigor. I’m not nostalgic about the fear. You can have the first without the second, and the best teachers proved it.
Because the teachers who influenced me most were the ones who challenged and pushed me hard, but believed in me. They provoked me to think further, to question my decisions, to dare. But also to have fun and not take myself too seriously, while taking the work very seriously. Above all, they helped me tap into what makes me me. Those lessons have stayed with me my whole career and life. I’m grateful.
A few names who stand out: Jonas Vögeli, who taught me to have fun and do my own thing. Ludovic Balland, who pushed me to dare more in my design. François Rappo, who encouraged me and taught me precision. NORM, whose work was a constant inspiration. Angelo Benedetto, who was generous and supportive. And there were more: Nicole Udry, Vincent Jacquier, Ian Party, Gilles Gavillet, Diego Bontognali. I could tell a story about each of them. I also want to mention Pierre Keller, ECAL’s legendary director, who I admired.
After ECAL I jumped straight into the real world, taking a full-time job at Meiré und Meiré in Cologne right after graduating. There I was lucky to learn from mentors like Mike Meiré and Tim Giesen. A few years later I went independent, and then an offer came from 2x4 in New York. Working with Georgianna Stout and Michael Rock taught me the idea of the designer as author and opened up a whole new dimension of what design practice could be.
And honestly, some of my greatest teachers have been books. Steven Pressfield fundamentally shaped how I think about creativity and craft. And to this day: Hermann Hesse and Thích Nhất Hạnh.
Looking at your professional path, from ECAL to 2x4, and later to establishing your independent practice, how have these different stages collectively shaped your current design philosophy?
I feel like each stage stripped away a layer of assumption about what design is supposed to be.
ECAL stripped away the assumption that design is intuition. It gave me the foundations: Swiss precision, typography, systems thinking. You earn the right to break the rules only by first understanding them deeply. But also: don’t be afraid to be more yourself.
Meiré und Meiré, and then 2x4 in New York, stripped away the assumption that design is about making beautiful objects. Suddenly it was about ideas, about strategy, about how design shapes culture and how culture shapes design.
And establishing my own studio stripped away the assumption that someone else defines the work. It was about integration, and about embracing responsibility. It meant taking all of who I am, and applying it in a way that finally felt authentically mine.
I’ve worked with brands like Apple, Nike, and Salomon, and what connects all of it is a belief that great design is about clarity of intention. Not minimalism for its own sake, but a relentless focus on what actually matters, and the courage to strip away everything that doesn’t. But I don’t like clinically clean design. I want soul. I need soul. And when I say soul, I mean the moment a piece of design lets you feel the people and the conviction behind it: warmth, tension, a point of view. Clean is easy. Clean with a heartbeat is the work. What I love most is translating a person’s vision into something tangible: helping to visualize ideas, making things real.
So today my philosophy is simple: design should make things clearer, not more complicated. Every project is a chance to find the essential truth of what you’re communicating and to give it form with precision and conviction. I’ve come to call it Soulful Clarity: design that’s smart, clean, and well-crafted, but never clinical. I want people to feel something when they see it.
You have long emphasized clarity, elegance, and modernity in your work. How do these aesthetic values translate into concrete visual strategies across different client projects?
Soulful Clarity is functional. When I start a visual identity, the first question is always: what is the one thing this needs to communicate, instantly?
Elegance, for me, is sophistication in the simple. The fewest elements, edited until what remains feels inevitable rather than designed. But reduction, in my work, is a way to intensify, never to cool down.
And modernity means relevance: speaking the visual language of your time without chasing what’s momentarily fashionable. That comes from paying attention to culture, to what’s happening in fashion, architecture, technology, art.
For each client the balance shifts. A project for Salomon calls for a different expression than, say, Mugler. But the underlying commitment stays constant.
In the redesign of Salomon’s logo, you referenced 1980s graphic identities and the work of Neville Brody. How do you balance historical context with contemporary application in such projects?
History is not a moodboard, it’s a toolkit. When I reference someone like Neville Brody, or the graphic energy of 1980s identity design, I’m not interested in nostalgia. I’m interested in understanding why certain approaches worked, what made them feel powerful, and how those principles can be reactivated in a contemporary context.
With Salomon, the key insight was that the brand had this incredible heritage as a performance-driven, mountain-born company. But its visual identity had become quite generic. It could have been any sportswear brand. Looking back at the graphic confidence of the 1980s and 1990s, bold, unapologetic, almost architectural, gave us permission to be more assertive.
My approach to balancing historical reference with contemporary application comes down to two rules. First, study the deeper underlying principle. Don’t copy the aesthetic, understand the structural idea behind it. Second, filter everything through current technology and media contexts: a logo today has to work on a 12-pixel favicon and on a building façade.
The goal is always to create something that feels like it’s from right now, but carries the weight and confidence of something that’s been around for decades. Seeing the new Salomon logo out in the world made that ambition very real.
The founding of PRESENT magazine emerged from your interest in work psychology, creative processes, and the power of habits. How do you use this platform to demystify the act of creation?
PRESENT started from a frustration I think a lot of makers share: the creative industry loves to mythologize the creative process. We celebrate the finished work, the genius moment, the overnight success. And we almost never talk about the actual daily, often unglamorous reality of Doing The Thing.
PRESENT, and the ecosystem that grew around it, exists to flip that narrative. It started as a print magazine and became a whole world: a community of creatives we call the Consistency Club, and presentOS, the app where our tools and library live. Whatever the format, the questions stay the same. Not only “What did you make?” but “How do you make?” and, most importantly, “What keeps you from making?”
Every issue of PRESENT features honest conversations with creators about their process: the resistance, the doubt, the habits that sustain them. How they structure their days, how they push through blocks, how they stay consistent over years rather than just during bursts of inspiration. How they find their way into flow, again and again.
The core belief I’ve arrived at is this: creation isn’t really about talent or inspiration. Talent sets your ceiling, maybe. Showing up decides whether you ever get near it. So we obsess over the systems and habits that make the work possible even when, especially when, you don’t feel like it.
With PRESENT, I want to give other creators permission to be ordinary in their process, so they can be extraordinary in their output. Creation doesn’t need to be mystified. It needs to be demystified, made accessible, made daily.
As a designer trained within a rigorous and structured educational system, which aspects of today’s design education do you believe most urgently need to change in order to better adapt to the future design ecosystem?
A few things come to mind.
First, design education needs to teach people how to think strategically, not just how to execute beautifully. If you can’t articulate why your solution makes sense, you’ll always be at the mercy of someone else’s decision-making.
Second, we need to fundamentally rethink the relationship between design education and technology, especially AI. The tools are changing so fast that teaching specific software is almost pointless. What matters is teaching students how to learn new tools quickly, how to judge which ones actually serve their intentions, and how to hold on to their own creative judgment when a machine can generate options infinitely faster than they can. The designer’s value is increasingly in the thinking, the editing, and the taste, not in the production. We need to learn how to find and embrace our uniqueness, our very own “craziness”.
And third, I think we need to teach the core skills far more. The seemingly banal stuff that nobody treats as a real subject. How to manage your time and energy. How to decide what to actually work on. How to concentrate, and how to get into flow. How to be more present. How to rest more deeply. And alongside that, the psychological realities of a creative life: how to deal with rejection, how to sit with doubt, how to sustain a practice over decades. These aren’t soft skills. They are survival skills. I’ve watched too many talented people burn out or give up, simply because no one ever told them that resistance is normal.
This is exactly what I wish I’d had when I was younger, and it’s a big part of why I’m currently writing a book and framework called Do The Thing, for modern makers. And if I ever taught, and one day I would love to, the course would be half branding, half what I call action bias training: how to structure a work day, how to decide what to work on, how to build a personal library, how to ship. I already do a lot of this online, but honestly I’d love to be in the room with students much more, not just on a screen.
You have worked with a wide range of high-profile brands such as Mugler, Prada, Nike, and 032c, each with very distinct identities. How have these experiences deepened your understanding of “brand essence”? What is the most important lesson you have learned from working with such elite clients?
I have a deep fascination with branding. It never gets boring. And what I love is that the core challenge stays the same whether you’re working with a music band, a mountain sports brand, or a high fashion house.
For me it’s always about finding, or rediscovering, or sometimes establishing the red thread of a brand or person’s identity. And often it’s not about creating more. It’s about finding the essence through reduction: going back to the actual vision, the essential ideas of a brand and its roots. I often see my job as visually translating the vision of the client, and making sense of it.
Working across such different brand worlds has taught me that brand essence is rarely what it appears to be on the surface. Every brand has a public identity and a deeper truth, and the designer’s job is to find where those two meet, or where they should meet. I saw this up close at 2x4, whose defining client relationship was Prada: the essence was never luxury, it was intellectual provocation. And I’ve known 032c from the inside since I built their first website for Jörg Koch: a magazine on paper, a cultural position in reality. Once you understand a brand at that level, you try to stop decorating and start amplifying a worldview.
The most important lesson I’ve learned from working with such clients: the best brands know exactly what they are, and they have the discipline to say no to everything else. That sounds simple, but it’s incredibly rare. Most brands want to be everything to everyone, and the result is noise. The truly great ones commit to a point of view and trust that this specificity is what creates magnetic attraction.
Your role has gradually evolved from designer to creative director and strategic advisor. In your view, what kind of mindset and skill set do designers need today in order to meaningfully participate in core strategic conversations within organizations?
One fundamental shift is from “I make things look good” to “I help you see clearly.” That’s the transition from designer to strategic voice.
My starting point is that I see clients as collaborators, not as people handing down a brief. That means being very open, thinking out loud together, and treating the relationship as a real partnership. The shift became real for me the first time a client brought me in before there was a brief, when the question was not “how should this look” but “what should we even do.” I realized the most valuable thing I brought to the table was the clarity at the beginning, long before any layout.
Concretely, a few capabilities matter. Business literacy: not an MBA, but enough understanding of how businesses work to connect a design decision to a business objective. Otherwise you’ll be treated as a vendor, not a partner. The ability to frame problems before solving them: most designers jump to solutions too quickly, and a big part of my value as an advisor is helping organizations articulate what they’re actually trying to achieve, which is often different from what they first say. Communication: a brilliant strategy you can’t articulate is worthless in the room. And, most undervalued of all, emotional intelligence and patience: strategic conversations are political, full of egos and competing agendas, and influence works slowly.
The mindset, ultimately, is one of service: you’re there to help the organization find its own vision, not to impose yours.
Could you share your judging criteria with us? (From which perspectives do you evaluate a submitted design project?)
When I evaluate a design project, I look through several lenses, roughly in this order.
Intention and clarity of thinking. Does the project have a clear point of view? Can I understand what problem it’s addressing and why the designer chose this particular approach? I’m looking for evidence of genuine thinking, not just aesthetic production. The strongest projects are the ones where every decision can be explained.
Originality and courage. Does the work take a risk? Is there something here I haven’t seen before, whether in concept, execution, or the combination of the two? I’m far more interested in an ambitious project that doesn’t fully succeed than a safe project that’s perfectly executed. At the graduation level, I want to see students pushing beyond what’s comfortable.
Craft and execution. Once I understand the idea, does the execution honor it? Is the typography considered? Are the details resolved? Craft, to me, is care made visible. It tells me how seriously the designer takes their own ideas.
Relevance and cultural awareness. Does the project engage with the world as it actually is? Does it respond to real conditions, real audiences, real cultural moments? Design doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and the best student work demonstrates an awareness of the broader context it’s entering.
And finally, coherence. Do all the elements work together? Is there a consistent logic that runs through the project from concept to final form? Coherence is what separates a collection of nice visuals from a genuine design project.
And if I’m honest about how it played out in practice this year: whenever I had to break a tie, courage beat polish. Every time.
What is your overall impression of this year’s graduation projects?
What I can say across the whole field: the best projects weren’t just technically accomplished, they were asking real questions. There was a maturity in how many students engaged with cultural identity, sustainability, digital culture, and social responsibility, not as surface themes but as genuine driving forces for their work.
The visual quality was often very high. But I sometimes wished for more friction, more willingness to be uncomfortable or unresolved in pursuit of a more meaningful idea. The projects that stayed with me longest surprised me conceptually, not just visually.
In your view, what is the significance of a graduation project for students? What qualities do you think define an outstanding graduation work?
A graduation project is the first invitation to be truly free. There’s no brief from a client, no narrow assignment from a professor. A chance to ask: what do I care about? What kind of designer do I want to be? What’s my point of view on the world? Not everyone dares to accept that invitation, and I understand why: freedom is frightening. But that’s exactly what makes it precious.
I believe the significance of a graduation project goes far beyond the grade or the exhibition. It’s a moment of self-definition, and it marks the transition from student to practitioner, from someone who responds to briefs to someone who generates their own questions.
I know this from my own experience. One of my student projects was an ongoing magazine called Better Mjstakes. I had interned at Meiré und Meiré in my hometown Cologne, and I went back to see Mike Meiré with a recorder and too many questions: how do you actually work, what does a creative company look like from within? Right after graduating, that studio became my first job. And looking back, that project planted the seed for everything I do with PRESENT today. I’ve been asking makers how they work ever since.
An outstanding graduation work, in my view, does three things. It demonstrates personal investment: you can feel the topic comes from a real place of curiosity or concern. It shows intellectual rigor: the design decisions are grounded in reasoning, not just intuition. And it takes a risk: it pushes into unfamiliar territory and isn’t afraid to fail in the pursuit of something more ambitious.
The graduation projects I remember years later are never the “perfect” ones. They’re the ones where I could feel a human being behind the work: someone with something to say and the courage to say it their own way.
After this competition, what observations, thoughts, or concerns do you have regarding current design education?
Judging a competition like this gives you a rare cross-section of what design education is producing right now, and a few patterns concern me.
The first is homogeneity. Too many projects look like they could have come from the same school, the same moodboards, the same prompts. This isn’t the students’ fault, but maybe rather a symptom of an educational system that sometimes rewards conformity to current aesthetic trends over genuine exploration. Design schools need to do more to cultivate individual voices.
I also worry about the relationship between technology and thinking. AI tools are making it easier than ever to produce visually impressive work, which means the bar for what constitutes meaningful design is rising. Schools need to put more emphasis on the Why. Because the How is becoming increasingly automated.
And many students struggle to articulate their work, verbally or in writing. The ability to explain your design thinking clearly is part of the work itself, and schools should treat it that way, not as an afterthought.
One uncomfortable thought I’ll allow myself: competitions like ours reward projects that present well, and presenting well is not the same as thinking well. As jurors we have to actively look past the gloss, and I’m not sure we always succeed. I include myself in that.
That said, I want to be clear: I’m also deeply encouraged. The best projects I’ve seen show a generation of designers who are thoughtful, culturally engaged, and technically skilled. The potential is enormous. My concern is whether our current educational structures are doing enough to develop that potential to its fullest.
From your perspective, what does a graduation design award mean to students?
An award at the graduation stage is less about validation and more about visibility. Let me explain what I mean.
Of course it feels good to be recognized, and it should. Students have worked incredibly hard, often for years, and having that effort acknowledged by a professional jury is meaningful. But the real value of an award like this is that it opens doors. It puts your work in front of people who wouldn’t otherwise see it. It gives you a credential that helps in those crucial first conversations with potential employers, clients, collaborators, or mentors.
What I’d caution against is treating the award as the point. It’s a door, and doors only matter if you walk through them. I can only speak from my own experience here: winning an ADC Young Guns award early in my career opened rooms I wasn’t in yet, and it gave me a small reserve of confidence in years that were full of doubt. What it did not do: design a single project for me, or build the career. That was still daily work, for years. The award doesn’t define you. What defines you is what you do next. And then the day after that, and the day after that.
The most valuable thing about a graduation award, honestly, might be the confidence it gives you to keep going. The early years of a design career are brutal: full of doubt, rejection, and compromise. If an award gives you even a small reserve of belief in yourself during those years, it’s done its job.
What advice would you give to young graduates and emerging designers? Which qualities do you believe are most helpful for their professional development?
I’ll share what I wish someone had told me when I graduated, and what I now spend a lot of my time at PRESENT trying to communicate to emerging creators.
Start before you’re ready. The single biggest obstacle for young designers isn’t lack of talent or opportunity, it’s waiting for permission. Waiting for the perfect project, the perfect client, the perfect moment. That moment doesn’t come.
You create it by starting, by shipping work, by putting things out into the world even when they’re imperfect. I have a phrase I come back to constantly: action cures anxiety. The longer you wait, the louder the doubt becomes.
Build your own tools and platforms. Don’t wait for someone to hire you to do interesting work. Create your own projects, your own magazine, your own brand, your own experiments.
The designers who have the most interesting careers are the ones who generate their own work, not just respond to briefs. This is something I’ve committed to with PRESENT: building my own platform rather than depending entirely on client work.
Develop consistency over intensity. Everyone can work hard for a week. The question is whether you can show up and do the work for ten years. Build sustainable habits. Protect your energy. Design a daily practice that you can maintain. That’s what compounds into a meaningful body of work. I’ve kept my daily journal for over fifteen years now, and that simple practice of showing up every day has been one of the most valuable tools to me as a designer.
Stay curious beyond design. The most interesting designers I know are deeply engaged with the world outside design, with psychology, sports, science, philosophy, nature. Your references shape your work, and if your only references are other designers, your work will always feel derivative.
And finally: be patient. Careers are long. Trust the process, do the Thing, and remember that you’re at the beginning of your story while everyone you admire is somewhere in the middle of theirs.
NewOne Awards has now been running for four years, documenting and showcasing graduation projects primarily from Chinese design schools as well as students from different countries. Could you share your expectations for the future of NewOne Awards, or any suggestions you may have?
First, I want to acknowledge the importance of what NewOne Awards is building. Four years of consistently documenting and celebrating graduation work is fantastic. It creates an archive, a reference point, and a community that benefits students, educators, and the profession as a whole.
For the future, I think it’d be great to see NewOne Awards continue to expand its international dimension. Not just in terms of which schools participate, but in fostering genuine cross-cultural dialogue about design education. The best ideas about how to teach and practice design are emerging from all over the world, and a platform like NewOne is uniquely positioned to facilitate that exchange. What Chinese design students can learn from European or Latin American or African approaches (and vice versa) is incredibly rich territory.
I’d also encourage the award to think about what happens after the competition. How can NewOne help connect winning students with professional opportunities, mentorships, or collaborative projects? The award itself is a moment, but the relationships and pathways it creates can last a career.
The foundation is strong and I’m excited to see where it goes!
I’m working on a book and framework to help as many people as possible. It’s called Do The Thing. A Modern Maker Manifesto and is now available to pre-order.
If you want to join a supportive group of 267 Modern Makers from all around the world, check out our Present Space. We are meeting in the Consistency Club every two weeks to talk about the bliss and struggles of getting closer to our Favorite Unrealized Projects.
