Qinyan (Doris) Liu did not expect to return to the advertising industry. After getting trained in that field, she shifted her focus to a more critical and reflective approach to design, pursuing an MFA in Communications Design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Originally from China, she is now a New York-based Visual Designer and Self-Publishing Artist with a portfolio of original titles.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
In 2023, she developed Distant Flash, the award-winning editorial project examining the embodied experience of travel photography. She later co-founded Dream Labor Press as a platform for extending this line of inquiry through independent publishing. To date, the press has participated in major art book fairs in the United States and internationally, from New York and Boston to Chengdu and Wuhan, and its publications have entered the collections of art institutions and academic libraries.
Embracing Haptic Intimacy
Liu’s creative philosophy is centered on materiality, tangible experience, and the investigation of individual memories under a universal context. Distant Flash treats travel photography not as documentation, but as a bodily and temporal set of actions and reactions shaped by Time, Space, and Sociality. Through editorial sequencing, typographic decisions, and material construction, the publication resists the disposability typically associated with digital images, instead requiring sustained engagement from the reader.
The project received recognition from the Type Directors Club (TDC) in 2024, and has been presented internationally with the traveling exhibition of this award. It has also been acquired by multiple institutional collections dedicated to book arts and visual culture, including the Fleet Library of Rhode Island School of Design and the Bowes Art & Architecture Library of Stanford University. These acquisitions position Distant Flash as a study in how editorial structure and material form and visual interpretation shape each other. Within Liu’s broader practice, Distant Flash functions as a reference point for how design can shape attention through pacing and physicality.
Rebuilding the Narrative Engine
Attaching great importance to authenticity and reflectiveness, Liu had been skeptical of the way design often engages in contemporary advertising, which is frequently characterized by surface-level stimulation. However, it was upon joining the New York team of SuperHeroes Agency that Liu’s notion of advertising began to change. Awarded as Ad Age’s Small Agency of the Year in 2025, SuperHeroes is a creative agency that eschews traditional commercial formats, focusing instead on “earned-first” and “non-boring” campaigns for global brands such as Lenovo, Buick, and Netflix.
Within this context, Liu has acted as the main graphic designer for Lenovo Yoga’s The Art of Making documentary series, which foregrounds the real creative process over direct product promotion. In this project, Liu approaches visual language as a structural component of storytelling. She led the design of the project’s graphic identity, including title/ending systems and graphic transitions throughout, contributing to the final 70 assets to ensure the delivery to every channel. She brought together the three separate stories with a cohesive graphic narrative, and rendered human creative expression skillfully under the commercial framework.
The Art of Making forms part of the long-running Made with Lenovo Yoga program, a creator-led content platform that SuperHeroes has been dedicated to building. For this program, Liu developed a cohesive visual identity that integrated and allowed for diverse creator styles while ensuring brand recognition. By translating complex concepts into accessible graphic logic, typography, and motion language, she ensures that commercial messages feel authentic rather than forced. Up to now, the Made with Lenovo Yoga contents have reached a global audience, generating over 1.3 billion views and contributing to a 23% growth in global sales for the initiative. By applying the same resonance-driven, individual narrative-focused philosophy, Liu bridges her artistic experimentation and commercial work.
Examining The Virtual Frontier
As virtual environments and machine-assisted creation increasingly shape contemporary visual culture, Liu’s practice has turned toward the question of mediation itself. While her indie-publishing work emphasizes the tactile, her commercial role situates her within environments shaped by emerging digital tools, including AI-assisted workflows.
When designing the visual identity for the Creative Vibes AI art podcast for Lenovo Yoga, Liu’s interest in artificial intelligence as a subject of investigation was aroused. Instead of framing this technology as a pure tool for efficiency, she raises questions about authorship, ethics, and interpretation. This line of research informs her project in progress, Hey GPT, Write Me a Fan Fiction. In this experiment, she requests the LLM to create a romantic love story between Dante and Virgil, the literary characters from the Divine Comedy. This project investigates the essence of literature and human creation through the lens of machine intelligence.
Working Across Boundaries
The boundary between applied and self-initiated work remains deliberately porous in Liu’s practice. Commercial projects absorb the narrative discipline and structural rigor developed through publishing, while independent works remain attentive to the realities of contemporary media systems.
Across formats and contexts, Qinyan (Doris) Liu’s work resists immediacy in favor of duration. In a media landscape increasingly shaped by speed and automation, her work tackles design not as a solution, but as a structure, one that leaves space for ambiguity, intimacy, and reflection.
Qinyan (Doris) Liu’s website: designdorisliu.com
Words by Web Editor Maya Lane.
