This article is based on a first-person interview with Haohui Gong.
For Haohui Gong, design was never a carefully planned career choice. It emerged naturally through curiosity, visual thinking, and a rare ability to focus deeply when creating. In this interview, he shares how early experiences, architectural training, and an evolving design philosophy led him into the field – and what continues to inspire his work today.
Why have you decided to step into the design field? What inspires you and why?
I was born in China, and I’ve loved drawing for as long as I can remember. However, I never had the chance to receive formal art training. My parents hoped I would “focus on academic success,” so most of my time was occupied by schoolwork and after-school tutoring. But I always found ways to stay close to art. From primary school to high school, I was the person responsible for designing the class blackboard posters.
Everything changed during a high school art festival. The school launched a logo design competition for the event, and I decided to give it a try. I spent an entire weekend designing two concepts and submitted both. A week later, the results were announced: my two designs won first and second place.
At the opening ceremony, when the principal introduced the festival logo in front of the entire school and credited me as the designer, I felt a kind of joy I still remember vividly today. That was the moment I realized I wanted to become a designer or even an artist (too poor to be an artist though).
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
When it came time to choose my university major, I went against my parents’ expectations of finance, medicine, or teaching and chose architecture instead. I knew that I had strong signs of ADHD (undiagnosed), and design was the only thing I could truly focus on. Only when designing could I sit in a chair for 36 hours straight (yes, many sleepless nights working on architecture projects) and enter a state of mind flow.
To be honest, before choosing design, I didn’t know any designers personally. I didn’t have systematic drawing skills. I only knew that the world was full of images, structures, interfaces, and beautiful things and that I wanted to create them.
“Design was the only thing I could truly focus on.”
How do you measure the success of your design?
For me, design success has both rational and emotional measures.
During my undergraduate and postgraduate studies in architecture, grades were the primary rational metric. But emotionally, success was hearing that moment of “wow” when I presented my work in front of professors and peers. That instant reaction told me the design had communicated something powerful.
Later, when working in architecture firms and internet product companies, success became more data-driven: feedback from team leaders, peer reviews, A/B testing results, and business metrics. These are all important indicators.
However, on a more personal level, I consider a design successful when clients or users look at it and say, “This works well,” and have very few objections. That usually means the design has truly met their needs and that is the kind of success I value most.
What is your biggest challenge in the design creation process?
Knowing when to stop.
I am a perfectionist, and as designers know, design has no endpoint. It took me a long time to understand Mies van der Rohe’s principle of “Less is more.”
Before a deadline, I often struggle to stop refining details, even when the design already meets all requirements. There is always one more adjustment to make, one more detail to polish. When clients or colleagues say, “It’s good enough,” my instinctive response is often: No, it’s not.
Because of this, I’ve realized that starting a design can sometimes be the hardest part. Once I begin, I know it will consume all my energy and attention.
Learning to balance excellence with restraint is still my biggest ongoing challenge.
What principles do you follow when creating attention-grabbing design?
One core principle: thorough research before design.
Whether I’m working on architecture, website design, UX, or even game environments, I always study a large number of similar projects. When I encounter a new design category, I actively build my own case library.
After reviewing enough examples, patterns naturally begin to emerge:
What conventions are consistently used?
What makes a particular work stand out from the rest?
Once I understand both the norms and the differentiators, I feel confident and clear about the direction of my own design.
Attention-grabbing design, in my experience, is rarely accidental; it’s built on deep understanding.
What do you think will be the future of design, or the next big change?
AI without a doubt.
Tools like Lovable, Midjourney, and ChatGPT are already reshaping how we create. I know many artists strongly oppose AI, but to me, this moment feels similar to when cameras first appeared. You could reject photography and continue painting impressionist landscapes, or you could integrate the camera into your process and help create an entirely new artistic movement.
I don’t want to become one of the artists in the French salons who criticized Impressionism. And I don’t want to be someone in Dafen Village still reproducing Van Gogh using the same old techniques decades later.
I prefer to work with AI. After all, if our future AI overlords discover that we’ve been openly opposing them, I’d rather avoid being turned into a human battery in the Matrix (just kidding).
About the Designer
Haohui Gong is a designer with an architectural background whose work spans digital products, websites, and interface-driven experiences. His path into design grew organically from early visual exploration and was later shaped through formal architectural training and hands-on industry work.
Across architecture studios and internet product companies, Haohui has developed a practice rooted in structure, clarity, and deep focus. He is particularly interested in how research, visual systems, and emerging technologies influence perception and decision-making in design.
His current areas of focus include:
architecture-informed approaches to digital design
UX and interface systems
research-driven and attention-aware design
experimenting with AI as a creative and exploratory tool
He actively works with tools such as Lovable, Midjourney, and ChatGPT, viewing them as collaborators that support exploration rather than replace human judgment.
Haohui is currently open to freelance and independent collaborations.
Project & Designer Links
Designer
Designer website
https://haohuigong.framer.website
Project
Original website (before redesign)
https://iha151295.wixsite.com/iris-hammers-coach
Existing site prior to Haohui Gong’s involvementRedesigned website (by Haohui Gong)
https://www.iris-hammers.coach/
Website redesign led by Haohui Gong
