# Yiying Lu

Yiying Lu is an artist, designer, educator and public speaker, recognized for creating the Twitter Fail Whale, the Unicode dumpling 🥟 & boba tea 🧋 emoji, and Disney Shanghai Paper-cut Mickey Mouse. She was born in Shanghai, China and educated in Sydney, Australia at University of Technology Sydney and London, UK at Central Saint Martins, University of Arts London. She is based in San Francisco, California, US.

## Career

Yiying Lu has been using art, design, and technology to unite people across language and cultural barriers. After earning her bachelor’s degree of Design, Visual Communication from the University of Technology Sydney in 2008, Lu founded the Yiying Lu Studio, and worked with many early startups in silicon valley, including Sam Altman's first startup Loopt.
While earning her degree, Lu created a digital artwork titled "Lifting a Dreamer" to send birthday wishes to a friend living far away. Lu then posted the image, featuring a serene whale being lifted out of the water by eight orange birds, to iStock, where Twitter co-founder Biz Stone discovered the image and thought it would make a good icon. In May of 2008 the image of a serene whale being lifted out of the water became the Twitter Fail Whale.
In July of 2008, Mashable held a competition for users to create an icon for Facebook based on the Fail Whale. The image gained attention online, leading to the creation of a profile page and fan club for the Fail Whale. While living in Sydney, Australia, Lu received requests from fans in San Francisco to create artwork for the first Fail Party—a lighthearted gathering of 200 people celebrating failure during the 2008 financial crisis. As the creator of Lifting a Dreamer, widely known as the "Twitter Fail Whale," an internet icon symbolizing resilience in failure, she designed a new art piece pro bono to uplift the community, despite never having met them in person or visited the U.S.
Her work soon gained recognition in Wired, where it was praised as a "Web 2.0 pop culture icon."
In February 2009, Lu won the Inaugural Shorty Awards in Design in New York, marking her first trip to the United States. Since there was no direct flight back to Sydney, where she was living, she opted for a three-day layover in San Francisco to meet her internet community. She met Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams in person for the first time during her stay.
In 2010, Conan O’Brien commissioned Lu to create the Conan O’Brien Pale Whale for his show on TBS, as well as his Team Coco website and Twitter page.
That same year, on December 2nd, Lu held an art show at Hotel des Arts in San Francisco, where she met Guy Kawasaki, who later introduced her to Sam Altman’s startup, Loopt. Lu contributed to Loopt’s SXSW marketing campaign and, during SXSW Interactive, connected with numerous startup founders from 500 Global and Y Combinator portfolio companies. Many of these founders later became her clients, laying the foundation for her eventual move to Silicon Valley.
Lu's fusion of art and technology continued in 2011 when she created the world's first hand-painted watercolor QR code illustrations, seamlessly blending QR codes with portraits of iconic fashion figures, such as Anna Wintour and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Chloë Sevigny, and Andreja Pejic.
In 2012, Lu was the featured artist for SXSW Interactive Big Bag, given to 30,000 attendees.
In 2013, Lu created the New York Shorty Whale in honor of the social media Shorty Awards, another outgrowth of the fail whale.
In 2014, Lu created Chinese paper-cut versions of Mickey Mouse, Simba, Mulan, Elsa (Frozen), and Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs for the inaugural recruitment campaign of Shanghai Disneyland opening in 2016.
In 2015, Lu moved to San Francisco, joining the venture capital firm 500 Startups as Global Creative Director. In the same year, Lu identified the absence of a dumpling emoji on mobile keyboards, designed an early version of the dumpling emoji, and co-founded Emojination with Jennifer 8. Lee. Between 2015 and 2020, Lu created six Unicode emojis now used by billions of people. These are the dumpling (🥟), boba tea (🧋), fortune cookie (🥠), chopsticks (🥢), takeout box (🥡), and peacock (🦚), representing sights, foods, beverages, images, and animals common in Asia and Asian American communities.
Between 2015 and 2016, Lu conducted hundreds of 1:1 branding and product consultations with 500 Global portfolio companies, identifying a common challenge among entrepreneurs. To address this efficiently, she began giving talks on cross-cultural design and creativity for 500 Global founders.
A colleague recognized the impact of her insights and invited her to speak at Startup:CON in Seoul, Korea, where she met IDEO’s Tom Kelley and SXSW Co-President and Chief Programming Officer Hugh Forrest.
n 2017, Lu became the first creative collaborator at IDEO Shanghai. That same year, she designed the bilingual Chinese-English branding for the NYU Shanghai Program of Creativity and Innovation.
In 2018, Lu became a featured speaker at SXSW.
From 2018, Lu expanded her focus on design education and public speaking, presenting at over 20 international conferences and academic institutions on topics related to design, creativity, and innovation. She was a speaker at events including TEDx Palo Alto, SXSW, Adobe MAX, Web Summit, Talks at Google, Today at Apple",TechCrunch, Smashing Conference (Smashing Magazine), Web Directions Summit, Tencent Design Week, and GeekPark 极客公园大会. She also gave talks at universities such as Stanford University, New York University (NYU), Tsinghua University, Peking University, and the University of Technology Sydney.
In 2020, Lu received the Award of Honor for her logo design for the United Nations’ COP 15 Convention on Biological Diversity.
In 2021, Lu was appointed to a four-year term as an Arts Commissioner on the San Francisco Arts Commission by the Mayor of San Francisco.
In 2022, Lu's Disco Winter Wonder Land & Sea, featured at the San Francisco “Let’s Glow SF” public art exhibit featured was,"a playful and whimsical celebration of the winter holiday season and animal inhabitants from different continents." The piece included north pole animals such as the polar bear, red panda, koala, and whale shark to promote biological diversity and ocean conservation.
In March 2023, Lu collaborated with the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley to create a 30-foot wall display at the museum entrance titled Little Emoji, Big Story. The exhibit highlighted advocates behind emojis that promote diversity, featuring representations such as the woman in a hijab 🧕🏻, Arepa 🫓, and multi-skin tone emojis.
In July 2023, Lu partnered with Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), the company that pioneered emoji, to celebrate World Emoji Day. She presented Emoji Masterpiece Remix, a series integrating public domain fine art masterpieces with modern-day emojis. The works included adaptations of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa, and Henri Matisse’s The Dance.
In October 2023, Lu collaborated with James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award-winning chef Martin Yan on a live demonstration at the inaugural SXSW Sydney in celebration of World Food Day.
In 2024 Lu received the Pantone Spotlight Artist award.
Yiying Lu is a San Francisco Arts Commissioner for visual arts. She is a frequent guest speaker and visiting lecturer. She has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, NBC News, TIME, Wired Magazine, The Verge, CNN, and the BBC.

## Honors and awards

* 2018 Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business Winner
* 2008 1st Shorty Awards winner in Design
* 2022 Australia China Alumni Award for the Arts and Creative Industries
* 2024 Pantone Spotlight Artist