Speaker Yiying Lu

Yiying Lu is an award-winning creative leader at the intersection of art, technology, and human experience — creator of the Twitter Fail Whale, six Unicode emojis including the Dumpling 🥟 and Bubble Tea 🧋, and large-scale visual identity work for the UN and Disney Shanghai. Her work explores how symbols, letterforms, and visual language can make people feel seen, included, and at home — across cultures and billions of screens. A former San Francisco Arts Commissioner and Global Creative Director at 500 Global, she is an Adobe Global Creative Ambassador and Fast Company Most Creative Person in Business, and speaks at SXSW, TEDx, and Web Summit. Born in Shanghai, educated in Sydney and London, and now based in San Francisco, she brings a lived multilingual perspective to the question of how design creates belonging.