At press time, Malaysian-born designer Chean Wei Law, aka Undoboy, was on his way to Wieden + Kennedy/Portland, after roughly a year as an art director at JWT/New York. Only 26, he's also already put in an 18-month stint at Crispin, Porter + Bogusky in Miami, which was a short hop from Florida's Ringling School of Art and Design, where he got a BFA in graphic design in 2005. As his name implies?though CanDo Boy might be more on the mark, since his interests range across brand identity, editorial design, interactive design, character design, packaging, toys, motion graphics, and illustration?he was doing online work at Crispin, mainly for Burger King (including the Coq Roq art) and Mini. But he wanted to get his ticket punched in New York, and now that he's had a taste of JWT (where his most notable contribution was the iconic Halls Defense print/poster campaign), it's off to what he hopes will be the richer design pastures of Portland.
Undoboy Photography and Illustration 2007
Agency work aside, his design sidelines are led by a line of Super-Bastard Box Art characters ($95 for the set of 16, which can make 64 different characters), sold in stores like Kidrobot. If this seems like a quintessentially Japanese toy idea, it is. His influences "can be attributed to growing up with manga and Japanese/Hong Kong pop culture,"
he says. He's "obsessed with icon and character design, with gradient colors being one of my trademarks." He's also got a line of Undoboy wall decals in the works from surface graphics company Blik, but he struggles to find the happy medium between art and commerce. "My love for design creates conflicts on commercial projects," he admits. "Commercial art is never that satisfying. Design should be fun, yet the commercial aspect has innate conflicts for an artist. Creativity has the power to simplify life and on some level bring happiness to both the public and the artist. Whenever I design, I remind myself of that. If I maintain my voice throughout my work, then my path within design will be fun and at the same time an opportunity to learn. I started my design studio with a simple philosophy: 'Design brings happiness.' "
