2025-11-06
Lauren Rodriguez
Design Dispatch, New York
When the Future Forward Award announced its Fall 2025 honorees, one name stood out for her quietly profound visual language: Freya Yeh, a Taiwanese designer based in Los Angeles. The award, known for celebrating authentic and boundary-pushing creativity, recognized Freya for her ability to translate emotion into image—her work bridging surrealism, cultural nuance, and deeply human storytelling.
The Future Forward Award is not a typical design competition. Rather than spotlighting trend-driven aesthetics, it seeks out creators who redefine what design can do—those who make the intangible visible. Freya’s practice embodies that mission. Through design, illustration, and animation, she captures the ephemeral—connection, renewal, and transformation—with a sense of empathy and restraint that feels both timeless and distinctly modern.
Currently a Senior Designer at BUCK, Freya’s work moves fluidly between commercial and personal realms, yet always retains a core of emotional clarity. Her pieces reveal not just what we see, but what we feel—the flicker of light before change, the quiet tension of becoming.
When Venmo teamed up with BUCK to create a new illustration system, the goal was to tell stories about money, community, and individuality—through visuals as vibrant as the people who use the app. Freya’s contribution focused on music festivals, spaces where rhythm and energy become a language of togetherness. Her illustration mirrors that same pulse: figures in motion, lights in sync, and an invisible current that binds everyone in the crowd. Just as Venmo connects people through the seamless exchange of value, Freya’s work celebrates connection through shared experience—a dance of color and emotion, on and off the stage.
Created for NEW BEGINNINGS, an exhibition featuring 20 artists from BUCK’s Asian Employee Resource Group, Freya’s New Beginnings series reflects on the cycles of change, opportunity, and rebirth.
“For me, every new beginning is part of an endless cycle,” she says. “It’s traced through moments of light—dawn, sunset, and midnight.”
Across three illustrations, Freya captures this rhythm of renewal using layered gradients and fluid transitions that evoke air, light, and time. Each piece glows softly, as if lit from within—an homage to resilience and the quiet optimism that persists even in darkness. “You might feel you’ve reached the lowest point,” Freya adds, “yet there’s always a glimmer of light waiting beyond the horizon.”
In The Peelings, Freya turns inward. The personal project depicts a woman whose skin is delicately pulled apart, exposing the raw, trembling truth beneath. The imagery is unsettling yet deeply tender—a metaphor for vulnerability, self-confrontation, and the painful beauty of transformation. Through painterly textures and tactile surfaces, Freya examines what it means to shed old layers—to peel back the guarded exterior and reveal the fragile sincerity that lies underneath. In doing so, she captures the universal ache of becoming: the discomfort, the release, and ultimately, the light that breaks through once the surface is gone.
Across commercial projects and personal explorations alike, Freya Yeh’s work demonstrates the power of design to illuminate the human experience. Her illustrations are not just images—they are emotional landscapes, inviting viewers to pause, reflect, and feel. In a world that often moves too fast, her art reminds us that transformation, connection, and light are always within reach, quietly shaping the stories we carry with us.