Yah-Leng Yu quit a Computer Engineering degree at NTU after one year — she knew from the first week it was wrong. What followed was a winding path through Boston, Los Angeles, and New York, through books and annual reports, through luxury fashion clients like Versace and Bvlgari, until she landed back in Singapore and founded Foreign Policy Design Group. The detours weren't detours at all. They were her education.
Can you tell us a little about your first few steps in your career. Was there a moment or experience when you realised this was what you'd do as a career?
Looking back, the signs were always there. As a child I was already an avid photographer, and I was consuming fashion magazines obsessively — not just for the fashion, but for the photography, the layouts, the whole visual world of it. I was drawn to how things looked and felt before I even had language for what that meant.
So when it came to picking a course in the US, I was genuinely torn between photography and graphic design. I ended up going with graphic design, honestly, because it felt more practical at the time — photography meant buying equipment, film, all the extra stuff that adds up fast. Graphic design it was. Haha. Not the most romantic origin story but here we are.
Before that though, I made one detour — a Computer Engineering degree at NTU back in Singapore. I lasted a year. I knew it was wrong from the very first week of enrolment, sitting there thinking, I cannot do this for the rest of my life. So I quit, which at the time felt like a leap into the unknown, but in hindsight was the most obvious decision I've ever made.
I left to study at the Art Institute of Boston — and that was really where everything clicked. I did a lot of freelance work during my junior and senior years, which is the best kind of education alongside school. You're learning in class and then immediately applying it for real clients who actually need something from you. That pressure is formative.
After Boston I spent time in LA, then moved to New York, which is where my career really found its footing. I started at a smaller studio doing mostly books and annual reports — not glamorous, but honestly invaluable. That's where I quietly developed a real rigour around editorial and publication design; the discipline of working with type, hierarchy, and layout at that level just gets into your bones.
From there I moved into a studio that exclusively served luxury fashion — Versace, Bvlgari, Vivienne Westwood, Ferragamo — doing digital design and brand work. Rigorous, high-standard, fast. Working at that level early on, where the bar is uncompromisingly high, quietly set my internal standard for everything that came after.
I didn't know it at the time, but that was the moment. You don't always recognise the defining chapters while you're living them.
What lessons from your career have most shaped your style and approach?
That design is never just about making something pretty. Anyone can make something pretty — that bar keeps lowering.
What's harder and more valuable is making something that means something. Storytelling and building narratives that are genuinely responsive to context — that's what we obsess over at Foreign Policy. Every touchpoint we create, we want it to kindle some kind of emotion, whether small or big.
Working across so many different industries over the years has also shaped how I think. We've never restricted ourselves to one type of client or one genre of work — restaurants, hotels, art institutions, government projects, non-profits, startups.
Each one forces you to learn new subject matter, to get under the skin of a world that isn't yours. That curiosity muscle is the most important one to keep exercising.
And honestly — surround yourself with people who push you. Early in my career, being around designers who had incredibly high standards quietly raised mine. You absorb more than you realize from the environments you put yourself in.
Tell us about the core values or philosophies that guide your creative practice.
Context first, always. Before we touch anything visual, we want to understand what something is — its history, its audience, its reason for existing. Design without that foundation is just decoration.
Community, genuinely. We've put a lot of energy over the years into building spaces for designers to gather, share and grow — Design Diplomacy, Foreign Policy Summer School, Out of Office Festival.
That's not separate from our design practice, it's an extension of the same value. We believe design is stronger when designers are connected.And staying versatile.
We've always resisted being boxed into one lane. The diversity of our projects keeps us honest and keeps us learning. The moment you get too comfortable in a niche, you start repeating yourself.
What needs to change, so emerging and under-represented creative professionals have more opportunity, are seen and heard?
The global design conversation needs to genuinely widen its aperture — and that starts with who gets invited onto stages, into juries, into publications. For a long time, and still now to a large extent, the designers being celebrated and amplified internationally skew heavily Western.
Asian creatives — some doing extraordinary, boundary-pushing work — simply don't get the same visibility. Often it's not a talent gap, it's a platform gap.
But here's the other side of it that doesn't get talked about enough: a lot of Asian designers are under-represented partly because they aren't putting themselves out there. Whether it's cultural modesty, language barriers, or just not knowing how to navigate the global stage — they exist, they're doing incredible work, and yet they remain invisible to the wider world. What we've found through organizing events like Design Diplomacy is that you often have to go and find them.
We know they're out there because we're embedded in these communities — and so we make it our business to seek them out, reach out directly, and pull them onto a platform where they can finally be seen and heard. You unravel them, one by one. It's deliberate, it's personal, and it matters.
That's actually a big part of why we started Design Diplomacy during COVID. I was attending virtual talks and events and kept noticing how few Asian designers were being featured as speakers. So we created our own platform specifically to bridge that — to put designers from across Asia in front of global audiences and let them speak for themselves. No filter, no intermediary.
What needs to change is structural, but it's also cultural — on both sides. The people building lineups for conferences, festivals, and publications need to actively seek out voices outside their existing networks. Representation doesn't happen by accident — someone has to make the deliberate choice to look further. And Asian creatives need to show up more boldly too. Own your work. Put it out there. Don't wait to be discovered. Make noise.
How important is it that creative professionals find their unique voice?
It's everything — but I'd also say don't be in a rush to find it. Your voice develops through doing, through making mistakes, through absorbing influences and slowly figuring out what actually resonates with you versus what you think you should be doing. It takes time and it can't be forced.
What I'd caution against is performing a voice before you've found one. Chasing aesthetics that are trending, mimicking studios you admire — that's a normal part of early development, but it has to evolve into something that's genuinely yours.
The designers whose work stops you in your tracks are almost always the ones who aren't trying to sound like anyone else.
Find your obsessions. Your voice usually lives somewhere in there.
Looking ahead, what do you think are the key factors that will influence change for creative professionals?
Technology is the obvious one — AI is already changing what it means to be a designer in real and significant ways. The question isn't whether it will change things, it's how you position yourself in relation to it. The designers who thrive will be the ones who double down on what machines genuinely can't replicate: taste, context, cultural nuance, human judgment, the ability to ask the right question before reaching for an answer.
The other factor is community and visibility. The design world is globalizing in both directions — there's more access than ever to work, education and audiences internationally, but there's also a growing appreciation for design that is distinctly rooted in a specific place and culture. Asian design, Southeast Asian design specifically, has a real moment ahead of it. I want to see more of us step into that.
And honestly — resourcefulness. The designers who figure out how to create meaning and impact regardless of budget, geography or access will always find a way.
How much does your city influence your work?
Singapore is a small city, and that shapes everything. You can't afford to be a specialist who only does one thing — the market isn't big enough. That constraint actually made us better. It made us versatile, curious and resourceful in ways I'm not sure we'd have been if we'd stayed in New York.
But the smallness is also deceptive, because Singapore punches well above its size in terms of connectivity. It's a genuine hub — clients come through from all over the region and beyond, and it puts us within reach of an incredibly diverse spread of markets and cultures. We travel a lot.
That constant movement, the exposure to different cities and creative scenes, feeds directly into how we think and what we make. Singapore is home base, but the inspiration is rarely just Singapore.
How much does your culture influence your work?
Honestly, it started organically — and became more intentional over time. When we first came back to Singapore, we were still calibrating a lot of our instincts to what we knew from the US. The cultural influences crept into the work naturally at first, almost without us noticing. Then gradually we started leaning in more deliberately, and that's when things got really interesting.
A project like Figment — a co-living brand built around Singapore's shophouse heritage — was really built on cultural excavation. The brief demanded that we dig into the neighbourhoods, the history, the texture of what makes these spaces meaningful. We created an identity rooted in that specificity, and it resonated precisely because it was genuine. Or Brand Guide: Singapore Edition, our self-initiated publication surveying outstanding branding in Singapore — that came from a real desire to document and celebrate our own creative landscape, because nobody else was doing it at that depth.
Culture is context. And context, for us, is always where the best work begins.
Tell us some of your favourite, creative professionals and inspiring places in your city!
Theseus Chan is the godfather of graphic design in Singapore, as far as I'm concerned. I followed his work from my student days — I bought WERK magazine religiously, and it was a genuine source of inspiration at a time when I was still figuring out what great design even looked like. His work is singular, deeply considered, and utterly his own. A real original.
For places — Joo Chiat is my top pick. The preserved shophouses alone are worth the visit, but what makes it special is the mix — old and new, traditional and design-forward, heritage kopitiam next to a beautifully considered café or boutique. It has a texture and a vibe that feels very alive. I also love wandering Jalan Besar, Tiong Bahru, Kampong Glam — these neighbourhoods carry layers of history and culture that never get old, and they've quietly shaped a lot of what we do.
What should emerging creative professionals keep in mind as they begin their design career?
Keep showing up. I know it sounds almost too simple, but it's the thing that separates the people who make it from the people who don't. Show up when it's exciting, obviously — but more importantly, show up when it's unglamorous, when you're underpaid, when you feel invisible, when the project is hard and the brief is unclear. Consistency compounds. Nobody builds a body of work or a reputation in a single brilliant moment. It's the accumulation of showing up, day after day, that eventually becomes something.
And while you're showing up — stay curious about the world beyond design. Read, travel, eat, walk around neighbourhoods you don't know. The richest design comes from people who are genuinely interested in life. You can't tell stories about the world if you've only ever lived inside a screen.