Hi! I’m Jonathan — a native Noo Yawka, the son of immigrants, a design director, and an educator.
Growing up in Brooklyn as a Chinese-American, I gained a love of celebrating differences through experiencing cultures outside of my own. I’m fortunate to have been able to learn to appreciate other ways of seeing, as well as how they can fold into my own worldview. This curiosity and desire to celebrate culture through storytelling is one of my foundations for design. When I’m not at the office, I’m paying it forward as an early career mentor. And when I’m not working, I’m learning on the job in my newest role as a dad.
Over the past 10+ years, I’ve taken this curiosity through a variety of industries. Under my own practice, I’ve worked on Opening Ceremony’s first 10-year fashion tome, an exhibition about lunch for the New York Public Library, raised money for non-profits supporting Chinatowns everywhere, and taught undergraduate students at my alma mater, Parsons School of Design.
At Champions Design, I cemented my design fundamentals through building brand identity systems and leading digital experiences for clients like Prospect Park Alliance, Aetna, and the Gemological Institute of America. Taking my learnings in-house to Google, I helped champion Material Design, extending the open-source design language for new apps, icons, and offsite experiences like the refresh of Google Design. As an Art Director on Etsy’s Brand Design team, I embraced my values by collaborating cross-functionally with product, engineering, marketing, and research teams regardless of the need — whether it’s establishing company-wide brand guidelines and design system, driving strategy workshops, designing UI patterns, directing photo, video, and illustration content for 360 campaigns, or empowering junior teammates. As a design director at Capsule, I built a design team and collaborated across the organization to expand our footprint in NYC and pharmacy locations nationwide, and launched the company’s first national campaign. As a design lead at Waze, I lead a design team building tools, working across teams and product areas so we can end traffic, together.
My best experiences have come from rallying behind a shared cause and seeing the beauty that comes from that effort. Regardless of where I’m at, I look forward to building a team culture that celebrates difference, motivates one another to be their best selves, and in turn helps others through the value of design.
Let’s build something together.
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Select Clients
Aetna, Atlassian, Columbia Business School, Gemological Institute of America, Geoffrey Zakarian, Image of the Studio, New York Public Library, Opening Ceremony, Prospect Park Alliance, The New York Times, Union Theological Seminary, Urban Green Council
What’s your logo about?
Squaring the circle is both a geometry problem proposed in Greek mathematics and a metaphor for trying to do the impossible, balancing two disparate ideas and making it work. It is also a personal mark I used to draw back in college, representing different ways of thinking — my Chinese and American upbringing, Eastern and Western thought, black and white versus shades of grey — taking the best from different places to create something new.