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July 15, 2025Rochelle Ruixue Liu
Good design, for Rochelle Ruixue Liu, is about knowing what to leave out. Working at the intersection of UX, UI, and visual storytelling, she brings clarity and softness to the digital experience, believing in quiet elegance and the emotional impact of simplicity.
1Congratulations on winning the London Design Awards! Could you tell us a bit about yourself and what inspired you to pursue design as a career?
Hi! I'm Rochelle Ruixue Liu, and a UX/UI designer with a background in visual communication and interaction design, based in London. What inspired me to pursue design was a desire to make complex things feel intuitive and human. I was always drawn to how design can shape emotions and behaviour without saying a word — it’s like storytelling without a plot. I wanted to be a part of that.
2What does being recognised in the London Design Awards mean to you?
It’s truly encouraging. As designers, we’re often heads-down in the process, iterating endlessly and questioning every detail. This recognition feels like a quiet but powerful reminder that those efforts resonate beyond the project — it gives me confidence to keep experimenting.
3How has this achievement impacted your career, team, or agency, and what opportunities has it brought so far?
It has sparked conversations with people I wouldn’t have otherwise met — mentors, collaborators, and creative peers. It’s opened doors for visibility and strengthened my personal narrative as a designer who values empathy, storytelling, and thoughtful systems.
4What role does experimentation play in your creative process? Can you share an example?
Experimentation is the only way I move forward creatively. I see it as structured play. For this award-winning project, I prototyped a sensory journey that blended sound and visual cues to evoke emotional familiarity in unfamiliar settings — it wasn’t in the brief, but it made the project come alive.
5What's the most unusual source of inspiration you've ever drawn from for a project?
A laundromat in Tokyo. The repetitive sound and motion, mixed with soft lighting and quiet rituals of strangers, felt like the perfect metaphor for digital calm — it influenced a microinteraction design I was working on.
6What’s one thing you wish more people understood about the design process?
That good design often comes from restraint. It’s not about adding more — it’s about knowing what to leave out, and being okay with quiet elegance instead of loud visuals.
7How do you navigate the balance between meeting client expectations and staying true to your ideas?
By deeply listening first. Then I look for alignment between their needs and the user’s emotional truth. I frame my ideas in terms of what it helps them achieve, not just what I believe is “right.” That often turns resistance into curiosity.
8What were the challenges you faced while working on your award-winning design, and how did you overcome them?
One big challenge was maintaining emotional authenticity in a digital format. I overcame it by anchoring the design in real human memories — conducting story-based user interviews and translating those insights into ambient UI gestures and tonal choices.
9How do you recharge your creativity when you hit a creative block?
I go analogue — sketch, walk, cook. Or I immerse myself in a completely different art form, like cinema or poetry. Absorbing beauty from a different angle often shifts something in me.
10What personal values or experiences do you infuse into your designs?
Empathy, patience, and an appreciation for ambiguity. I grew up in a multilingual, multicultural environment — I’ve always been attuned to nuance, silence, and what’s not being said. That definitely shows up in my work.
11What is an advice that you would you give to aspiring designers aiming for success?
Don’t aim for perfection — aim for honesty. Be open to changing your mind. And don’t underestimate how much your soft skills will shape your design career.
12If you could collaborate with any designer, past or present, who would it be and why?
Probably Kenya Hara. His work reminds me that simplicity can be profoundly poetic. I’d love to explore how his thinking could be translated into digital and interactive experiences.
13What's one question you wish people would ask you about your work, and what's your answer?
I wish more people asked: “What feeling did you want to leave behind?” Because that’s what I think about most — not just how it looks or works, but how someone will feel after engaging with it.
Winning Entry
Homeward: A Journey Back to Tranquility | 2025 London Design Awards
Homeward is a reflective, scene-shifting RPG designed to help young adults navigate emotional stress and isolation in fast-paced urban life. Inspired by the creator’s personal experience of living alone as a young outsider in a fast-paced foreign city, the game explores themes of nostalgia, homecoming and... (read more here)