Leaping Creative is a brand experience design company, providing image strategy and experience design services for brands in different industries. The team is composed of excellent designers from various fields such as business research and analysis, brand visual communication, space experience shaping, interactive installation and material research. They are good at using cross-field design thinking and cross-field design means to provide high-quality professional design services and build unique experience for the brand.
Yinji: Young designers are the mainstay of design in the circle. How did you start your design path? What do you want for your future?
Zheng: In China, most people who become designers adopt the same approach. They like painting when they were children, so they enter a junior college to learn pure art, and then gradually choose their own direction to become designers. I am also a high school student in Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts Affiliated High School because Of my love of painting. I was fascinated to see a book by Charles Eames, a famous American furniture designer, and to know that there were people who could focus on designing chairs and eventually become masters. Later, I learned more and more with interest. When I was admitted to St. Martin's College of Art and Design in London, I chose product design as my undergraduate major without any hesitation. Later, after returning to China, I set up Leaping Creative and started to integrate more diverse design disciplines to design around "brand experience".
The expectation for the future is that Leaping Creative will become an influential brand in the field of brand design and physical experience, and will continue to cooperate with representative domestic or emerging brands and generate sparks.
Yinji: As a new designer in the industry, your works are innovative. Where do you get your inspiration from?
Zheng: The domestic business environment is in a period of rapid iteration. Whether it is popular culture or new consumption patterns, it changes a lot every two or three years. For example, all kinds of popular variety shows, the form and visual image are constantly innovating. As a designer, the grasp of inspiration and the update of the understanding of design require that you put yourself in the position of constantly contacting new information, and dynamically absorb new things by going to the market and contacting customers from all walks of life. The diverse backgrounds of our team members and the daily cross-disciplinary collaboration will also provide some new perspectives for our design.
On the other hand, In my daily work, I would also take a team to look back at the history and re-analyze the texture, function and aesthetic feeling of classic furniture, architecture and other designs. Settle down to gain a new understanding of the experience from the old.
Yinji: Leaping Creative is a diversified design company, which includes brand design. Can you talk about the future trend of brand design? Has the epidemic made you think more?
Zheng: Focusing on "brand experience" is our focus. In terms of design expression, we track design trends in different fields or disciplines. Another important point is that we are also continuing to pay attention to the market environment and consumer demand changes, here can share some of the changes.
一On the one hand, the brand is constantly focused, including the continuous subdivision of the industry and product category, to form its unique advantages and exclusivity; At the same time, the focus is also reflected in the increasing importance of brand experience, the increasingly refined degree of experience details, brand actually becomes a higher threshold. On the other hand, brand design will become more and more rich and diversified. Through multi-dimensional brand experience, it will constantly create surprises for consumers and bring continuous drainage and attention to the brand.
Behind these two aspects are some comprehensive factors such as consumption upgrading and consumer group iteration. The epidemic has made these trends more significant. This year is the 10th anniversary of Leaping Creative. Our team is also trying to summarize and output some experiences and opinions. We hope to have an opportunity to discuss with you later.
Yinji: There are many good commercial brands in the world, and their designs are outstanding. Is there any particular brand you admire? What do they tell you?
Zheng: Nike is one of the brands I keep following. Its products, marketing methods and offline experiences are constantly trying to break through and iterate. It can be seen that Nike's product segmentation for different scenes is becoming more and more extreme. On the one hand, it focuses on polishing products and on the other hand, it expands the dimension of experience. For example, the super experience stores in Shanghai and Guangzhou are injecting new design techniques to create more innovative and unique ways of communication between consumers.
Yinji: Do you have any selection process? What are your consideration factors?
Zheng: It will be selected. In addition to the consideration of regular business factors, what we value more is whether the brand has the willingness to make unique and innovative things, and whether the designers have the space to break the original industry conventions and achieve certain breakthroughs and solve commercial problems through design. We hope to help the brand iterate and prepare for the next phase through cooperation and co-creation.
