Some designers arrive in the world fully formed, with sharp lines and loud declarations. Suyoung Yang is not one of them. Her path to design unfolded the way light creeps into a room before dawn—slowly, almost imperceptibly, until everything is quietly illuminated.
Raised between Seoul and New Delhi, her childhood was a study in contrasts—chaotic streets, ritual quiet, the intimate friction of languages and landscapes. “I remember staring at a globe as a child,” she says, “and realizing how small Korea was. I wanted to see everything beyond it.” That hunger to look, to really see, never left her. It’s what led her to New York and to design—not as a career at first, but as a form of noticing.
Discovering Form, One Letter at a Time
At the School of Visual Arts, she encountered a way of working that felt monastic. There was reverence in the details, especially in typography. One early class required students to draw each Roman capital by hand. It was painstaking, quiet work. “That was the moment,” she recalls. “I realized the care and discipline behind every letterform. It wasn’t just about making things look good. It was about holding meaning inside of a form.”
This becomes the through-line in everything she does. Suyoung’s work isn’t about spectacle. It’s about precision and patience, about clarity emerging through layers. She begins each project with paper and pencil, sketching, scribbling, and resisting the speed of software. Only when the idea starts to speak—softly but surely—does she bring it to the screen. And even then, it’s not about arriving at a solution. It’s about opening a dialogue—with the client, with her collaborators, with the context the design will live in.
Brands, Reimagined with Care
She’s worked at some of the most respected design studios in the country: Gretel, Portrait, and Everything Type Company. And yet her presence in the industry feels refreshingly unforced, almost elusive. She doesn’t posture. She doesn’t shout. But her fingerprints are on brand systems that move across industries and continents.
At Gretel, she helped shape the new identity for Mode Analytics, a data platform beloved by engineers and analysts. The challenge was to honor the product’s technical depth while making it more accessible—less code and more conversation. The result was a bold yet flexible system: sharp lines, modular grids, and clarity that didn’t condescend, that received great critical acclaim receiving an Art Directors Club Cubes in the category of Communication and Brand Design.
Then came Mountain Hardwear—a company built on alpine grit. The rebrand was about finding beauty in utility, about layering refinement onto a legacy of performance. “We weren’t trying to make it pretty,” she says. “We were trying to make it true.” And that’s what her work did—it revealed the essence without unnecessary flourish, leading the project to obtain several accolades, including the recognition of excellence from the Type Directors Club.
Designing for Culture and Community
Beyond tech brand like Afterpay and Red Hat Software and consumer brands like Sightglass, Suyoung has left a delicate yet deliberate mark on the visual identities of prominent cultural institutions and public spaces. At Portrait and Everything Type Company, two renowned creative studios, her design fingerprints can be found in work for Nickelodeon, the Madison Square Park Conservancy, the Center for Brooklyn History, the University of Virginia, the Hourglass Art Advisory, and the Meridian International Center.
These are projects that don’t shout for attention—but they hold space. They communicate history, place, and purpose through type and layout, color, and composition. And they reflect Suyoung’s belief that good design doesn’t impose meaning—it reveals it.
Inspiration Beyond the Studio
Ask her about inspiration, and she doesn’t name-drop designers or obsess over grids. Instead, she talks about running, cooking, writing, and friends. “Some of my best ideas have come during a jog or while chopping onions,” she says with a smile. Life, in its ordinary rituals, feeds her imagination more than any Pinterest board ever could.
This approach—part practical, part poetic—helps her stay grounded in a fast-moving industry. “I try not to get too narrow in my definition of design,” she explains. “The mentors I admire most are the ones who move between disciplines, who think like storytellers or strategists, not just designers.”
A Language of Representation
Suyoung is intentional not only in her work but in who she works with. As a woman and person of color in the American design world, she actively seeks out collaborations with underrepresented creatives. “Representation matters—not just in the stories we tell, but in the people telling them,” she says. “Design has power. It shapes perception. So, it’s important that the people shaping it come from many different perspectives.”
This extends to her future ambitions, too. She speaks of launching personal projects—perhaps zines, research-based design experiments, or community collaborations—that live outside the usual bounds of client work. “I want to carve out more space for work that feels both personal and public. Things that ask questions, not just answer briefs.”
A Brand That Breathes
One recent highlight was designing the identity for Hija de Sanchez, a taquería group in Copenhagen led by chef Rosio Sanchez. “It was a dream,” Suyoung says. “Mexican food has so much vibrancy and history. Translating that into a visual system that felt alive and respectful was incredibly rewarding.” From logos to menus to environmental graphics, the project was a full immersion—and a reminder that branding, at its best, lives and breathes in the everyday.
Now, she’s deep into a new restaurant project in New York. The team is small, and the space is still under construction, but she speaks of it with a kind of quiet joy. “What excites me most is the idea that design can become part of people’s daily rituals. A menu they hold. A sign they pass. A logo they begin to associate with comfort or memory.”
The Long Game
Suyoung doesn’t romanticize the journey. She talks candidly about imposter syndrome, about the slow burn of learning to trust your eye, your instinct, your pace. “I used to think I had to get everything right immediately. But now I know the good stuff comes from the in-between moments—from process, from mistakes, from asking better questions.”
She doesn’t claim to have arrived. But she’s carved a space—a thoughtful, well-made one—for herself in the world of contemporary design. And in an industry that too often confuses speed with progress, Suyoung Yang is a quiet force: observant, precise, and unmistakably original.
