Berlin-based designer Yue Wang, winner of the TDK 2025 Packaging Design Award, blends innocence, experimentation, and play across her work. With a background in Creative Media, Film, and Animation, Yue brings an outsider’s sensitivity to graphic design, drawing equally from hand-made processes, analogue experiments, and digital tools. Her practice is rooted in curiosity, spaciousness, and a belief in design that feels alive.
Tell us about where you study/studied and some of your highlights and favourite lecturers and if you are self taught, how did you do it?!
I kind of consider myself as half self-taught. I studied Creative Media, Film, and Animation in Hong Kong and the UK, and have always been graphic design adjacent, though it was never formally part of my education. But all these disciplines have informed me on how to see and play. At university, I explored experimental animations using paper cutouts, oil paint, watercolours, and we did theatre workshops playing imaginary creatures. I’ve carried that sense of play and permission in me and I sprinkle it across my design. A decade ago, I took a short typography course where the lecturer used only printed letters for us to learn type. No screens, no devices. That was fascinating.
Exploring graphic design largely on my own has meant that I can bring in a sense of innocence — an outsider perspective. That I can hold rules lightly and find out for myself what’s truer, more alive, in the moment.
Tell us about your tools / what tech, programs, equipment and environment do you do your best work in?
For digital tools, I use most often Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. But some of my favourite ways to explore ideas are physical. Hand-drawing on paper: colour pens, acrylic paints, watercolour, crayon…for example. I also like to experiment with my printer-scanner and I’m always discovering new materials.
My environments can bring out different parts of me, too. Although I love the calm and safety of my home office, being in shared, communal spaces can be stimulating. wāv toothpaste for the TDK awards was created mostly in a cafe.
Tell us some of your favourite, creative professionals and inspiring places in your city!
Some of the creative souls who have inspired me: David Carson, Elizabeth Gilbert, Bráulio Amado, Samar Linn, Laura Evans, and Rick Rubin. And my creative communities inspire me every day as well.
In and around Berlin, I love the lakes in summer, Britzer Garten, the Christmas Markets, the A—Z Gallery for Graphic Design, the bookstore Do You Read Me?!... to name a few.
What are your biggest hopes and dreams for 2026, both for the world and your career?
I hope for the restoration of Gaza and the dignity of its people. I wish for the world more curious yeses to aliveness, more empowered noes to cages. I believe we are slowly opening our capacity to hold more contradictions, more messy humanness, and I want to be a part of that process of allowing in more of ourselves and each other.
In my own work and life, I wish for more spaciousness — to play, to rest, and to receive the good that is all around me. I want to support my clients in connecting with what they know is possible, so we can co-create and birth their ideas into the world — ideas that could shift everything.
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