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Recently, designer Yike Ni won the prestigious iF Award for her performance in the field of design. This award is widely recognized in contemporary industrial design and is known as one of the major design awards, alongside the Red xDot Award and the IDEA Award. The award sparked attention in the industry and recognized Yike Ni’s design skills and innovative concepts, marking a notable achievement in her career.
Looking back on Yike Ni’s design career, many of her works have demonstrated her creativity and humanistic care. Petco Cafe, Sentir, and IGO, for example, are notable designs recognized for their innovation, consideration of user needs, and impact on the development of the industry.
Petco Cafe originated from Yike Ni’s keen insight into the living needs of modern city dwellers. Pets are no longer just considered animals but family members. Yike Ni captured people’s desire to share moments with their beloved pets and integrated these elements with coffee culture, designing Petco Cafe, which represents a space that combines pet companionship with coffee culture. For Petco Cafe’s visual design, Yike Ni used artistic hand-drawn fonts and flexible organic graphics, breaking the stereotypes of traditional pet-related brands. These design elements echo the iconic cat and dog patterns of Petco Cafe, contributing to the brand’s recognition while distinguishing it.
Petco Cafe’s indoor space layout is clearly thought out. The seating arrangement not only allows customers to enjoy coffee comfortably but also leaves plenty of activity space for pets to play freely. From the eye-catching sign at the entrance to the bold coasters on the dining table, every detail of Petco Cafe is integrated with pet elements, creating an immersive experience. The Yike Ni team also chose durable and easy-to-clean materials, which not only make sure that the space can withstand the pets but also make cleaning and maintenance by the staff easier, highlighting the charm and care behind Petco Cafe’s design. Due to these design elements, Petco Cafe won the MUSE Creative Award Gold Award and the Good Design Award Silver Award in the United States.
In addition to Petco Cafe, Sentir is an exploration by Yike Ni of the interaction between smell and emotion. In the traditional perfume industry, lengthy, complicated descriptions are often used to introduce products, requiring users to have a certain knowledge of notes to choose their favorite perfume. However, Yike Ni was determined to change this. Her design of Sentir replaced convoluted text descriptions with intuitive visual mood boards. By applying color psychology and graphic semiotics, Yike Ni accurately corresponds each color with the specific emotional characteristics of the perfume. For example, bright orange-yellow represents the sweet elements of gourmand perfumes, and mysterious dark blue symbolizes the stable characteristic of fougère perfumes. She used simple yet meaningful graphics, such as rotating vortices to represent the long-lasting fragrance of the perfume and scattered squares to represent the multiple layers of the scent, modifying the abstract characteristics of the smell into intuitive visual images.
Moreover, in Sentir’s interface design, Yike Ni adhered to the principle of minimalism, adopting a black-and-white monochromatic tone and a streamlined layout to highlight the core role of the mood board. She led the team to conduct more than a hundred color grayscale adjustment experiments to ensure that the color tone presents the best visual effect under different screen brightness levels. With these modern designs, Sentir has reshaped how people explore perfume, changing it from a complex consumer decision-making process into a journey based on intuition and feelings. As a result, it won the Silver Award in both the MUSE Creative Award and the Good Design Award in the United States and became a model for the digital exploration of the perfume industry.
Finally, her third representative work is IGO, where the design demonstrates Yike Ni’s concern for social equity issues. In modern society, residents in low-income communities often struggle with long commuting times and high costs, making it challenging to ensure their travel safety effectively. Yike Ni led the team to use big data analysis, and through intelligent algorithms and humanized design, accurately planned routes, dispatched vehicles, and optimized the allocation of public transportation resources, improving travel for residents in low-income communities.
IGO’s dispatching algorithm monitors road conditions and adjusts plans to address potential issues like congestion and vehicle breakdowns. At the same time, IGO’s humanized interface’s interaction mode provides passengers with clear and accurate travel information, such as real-time shuttle bus and seat tracking, reducing the danger of nighttime travel caused by unclear information and improving the safety and reliability of travel. As IGO’s lead designer, Yike Ni adheres to the concept of “technology serving life” and considers user needs to be at the core of her design philosophy. She not only shows creativity in visual performance but also understands user pain points through in-depth user research to ensure that the interface is intuitive and easy to operate. With IGO, her design achieves the best balance between functionality and safety. With its functionality and social value, IGO became a 2024 IDEA Featured Finalist and an example of social design.
Yike Ni’s design career has entered a new stage. Two well-known companies have offered Yike Ni new opportunities. Among them, an artificial intelligence education technology company committed to updating the education model through autonomous animated characters has great development potential. The addition of Yike Ni will inject a novel design gene into this enterprise, helping it create a unique and highly influential visual image and promote the spread of innovative education technology.
Yike Ni’s new career trajectory will see her use the experience she has accumulated in projects such as Petco Cafe, Sentir, and IGO, as well as her grasp of design trends, to inject her creativity and care into her new work. Under her leadership, design will continue to influence people’s lives, education, and technological entrepreneurship, building more projects that touch people’s hearts and lead the development of the industry while continuing to write the next chapter in her design career.
