Brand & Communication Design · U.S. Green Building Council / GBCI, North Asia · 2020
The U.S. Green Building Council certifies buildings. My job was to make people care about that.
LEED certification is a technical standard: points, levels, verification, plaques. It earns respect from engineers and developers. It does not, on its own, make anyone feel anything — and an NGO whose mission depends on public will cannot only speak to specialists.
Over 2020 at USGBC's North Asia office I built the communication layer that let the organisation speak in two registers at once: a cartoon earth mascot and an illustrated Arctic Tern narrative for the public, and a rigorous bilingual event, brochure and data-visual system for the industry. Same organisation, same values, two very different rooms.
This is the project that proves range and system-building, not a single artefact. Lead with the idea — one brand, two audiences — and let the mascot, the podcast logo and the event visuals appear as evidence of it. Without that framing a reviewer reads this as “a lot of nice graphics,” which undersells it badly.
USGBC and GBCI administer LEED, the world's most widely used green building certification system. The North Asia office serves a market where green building is growing quickly and where most of the audience — developers, architects, facility managers, corporate sustainability teams — encounters the organisation through events, WeChat, and printed material rather than through the certification process itself.
That creates a specific communication situation:
A certification is a document. There is nothing to photograph, nothing to demo, no object that carries the brand into someone's day.
Industry professionals need proof — project counts, certification levels, credentialed professionals, case studies. The public needs a reason to care at all.
WeChat, industry expos, in-person seminars and printed brochures, all bilingual, all with their own conventions.
My role: I joined as the designer responsible for marketing and communication output across the office. This was my first Marketing and Communication Design role, and the scope covered graphic design, event visual systems, digital product UI, illustration and video.
How does an organisation whose core product is a technical certificate build a brand that both a structural engineer and a stranger on WeChat will take seriously?
Two constraints ran underneath everything:
Warmth in a sustainability brand is easily read as greenwashing. Anything friendly had to sit next to something verifiable — real project numbers, real certification data, real named case studies — or the friendliness itself becomes suspect.
In this market, brand assets do not travel because they are beautiful. They travel because someone forwards them in a chat, or walks past them in a lobby, or picks them up at an expo booth. The design had to be built for the way it would actually move.
One organisation, two registers.
Verify these against how you actually worked — state them only if they're true.
Each decision paired with its reasoning — show the artefact next to the argument.
The certification had no physical form the public could recognise, so I gave it one: an earth character holding the medal USGBC awards to certified buildings. The abstraction — a rating system — became a character with a face, and the medal made the character legible to the industry audience at the same time. It became the key visual for digital content across the North Asia office.
A logo sits on our channels and waits. A sticker set travels inside other people's conversations — Congrats, OK, Thank you, Hi, Bye, Good job — carrying the brand into exchanges we were never part of. This was the decision that turned an identity into distribution.
The choice was structural, not decorative. The Arctic Tern holds the record for the world's longest migration, so a story following one bird can legitimately cross every climate zone and ecosystem on the planet — which let a single narrative thread carry a global argument about sustainability without jumping between disconnected examples. The protagonist was chosen because of what its route made possible.
Wings Against Glass takes the narrative from emotion to consequence: a bird killed by a reflective façade, and then New York City's bird-friendly building legislation and its Bird Collision Threat Rating. The story ends where the organisation's actual work begins — building design standards. That connection is what keeps an illustrated bird story from being merely charming.
For SMARTER COMMUNITY and the other event campaigns, one key visual had to hold across formats it would never be seen in together: expo posters, agenda layouts, directional signage, lobby screens, speaker cards, WeChat announcements. I designed the system so recognition survived the change of format and language.
LEED Think Tank / 情报所 had to work as one mark in two writing systems, in a format where it appears as a small circular avatar before anyone reads a word of it.
Better buildings equal better lives. I built the visual concept on the relationship in that sentence — people and buildings shown in harmony rather than buildings alone — and chose a light, warm palette because the organisation is an NGO and what an NGO does is help. The data spreads (project counts, certified professionals, global and China figures) carry the proof; the illustration carries the reason.
The Marketing Director wanted an app where professionals could learn about the organisation and register for seminars. I worked from information architecture through to UI rather than starting from screens, because the value of the product was entirely in whether someone could find the right seminar quickly.
The system: a mascot and illustration language that gave an invisible certification a face; a sticker set that put it into circulation; a narrative campaign that connected sustainability to a single animal's journey and then to real building legislation; a bilingual event visual system that held across print, signage, screen and social; a podcast identity; brochures and infographics carrying the organisation's verified data; and an app taking professionals from awareness to registration.
What ties it together: every warm asset has a factual one within reach, and every factual asset inherits the same palette, illustration style and bilingual typographic system. The public and the industry saw different things and recognised the same organisation.
My contribution, stated plainly: I gave a technical standard an emotional register without spending its credibility — and built it as a system that worked in the channels this audience actually uses.
That credibility and warmth are not opposites, but they are also not automatic partners — you have to design the bridge between them. And that in communication design, distribution is a design material: the sticker set worked not because it was the best drawing I made that year, but because it was the asset built to travel.
This was where I learned that a brand is a system across channels rather than a set of artefacts — and that designing for people's relationship with something abstract is the part of the work I care about most. It is the same question I later took into product design at Yordando and into my master's research: how do people come to trust a system they cannot see?
Reference blocks and production notes. Turn the appendix off before publishing.
A full brand and communication system for the U.S. Green Building Council's North Asia office — mascot, podcast identity, event key visuals, app UI, brochures and an illustrated environmental narrative. One voice made to carry both technical credibility and public warmth.
Making green-building certification feel human: one brand system, two audiences, across print, screen, event space and social.
Brand & Communication Designer · 2020 · USGBC & GBCI, North Asia office (Shanghai)
Brand mascot & sticker system · Event key visual design · Podcast channel identity · App IA and UX/UI · Brochures, business cards, presentation and infographic design · Illustrated storytelling · Video editing