Zetao Chan
I explore how people perceive emotion and the world through design.
My practice moves between visual and interactive forms, spanning print, installation, motion, and digital systems.
I tend to create quiet tension within restrained forms, placing logic alongside emotion to observe how design responds to human behavior. My recent work focuses on sensory feedback and conceptual interfaces as a way to express care and awareness.
Email: ztchan26@163.com
CV
Work
- Saint Laurent Haus
- Anchor Gin
- Fragment Magazine
- The Fur Book
- Font Promo
- The Third Tongue
Archive
- Rage
- Illusions of Freshness
- EcoBite
Recent Projects
Project Name: Saint Laurent Haus
Branding
Spring 2025
This project reimagines a luxury fashion house through spatial and experiential design, extending Saint Laurent into a curated dining environment. It translates the brand’s elegance and modernity into a refined culinary experience, where menu and atmosphere draw from its legacy. Rather than a traditional restaurant, it proposes a new engagement with the brand—where luxury is inhabited, tasted, and lived.
Project Name: Anchor Gin
Packaging Design
Spring 2025
Albany Distilling Company, a small batch artisanal distillery nestled in the heart of historic downtown Albany, NY, combines traditional craftsmanship with modern innovation to produce premium spirits. As part of their growing brand, they sought to design the packaging for their upcoming Anchor Gin. The project included designing Anchor Gin’s visual identity to better express the distillery’s story, character, and artisanal roots while standing out in a competitive marketplace.
Project Name: Fragment Magazine
Book Design
Spring 2025
Fragments is a magazine series born out of a single object: the fur coat. Through its physicality and symbolism, it explores how material objects carry meanings beyond their surface. There are three issues in total: Disguise and Reinvention, Preservation, and Overconsumption - revealing the fractured relationship between identity, memory, and material culture.
Color is used to demonstrate the concept of disguise and reinvention, with the same color typeface appearing differently on two different background colors. 100 pages.
Project Name: The Fur Book
Book Design
Spring 2025
This project is a research-based publication centered around an object of my choice: fur coats. This publication explores fur as a symbol of power, identity, and femininity within mafia films and modern Mob Wives fashion. Structured in three parts—cinematic depictions, evolving Mob Wives’ dressing style, and contemporary brands—it traces fur’s transformation from a narrative costume to a cultural fashion statement. Through film-inspired layouts and visual gradients, the book examines how fur continues to carry meaning in both popular media and luxury aesthetics.
Project Name: Font Promotion
Motion Design
Spring 2025
Bold, loud, and unapologetically condensed--this promo celebrates Fit Variable, a typeface built to dominate space with maximum impact. Designed for extremes, it stretches and compresses to fill every pixel with power.
Format: 16:9 horizontal
Time: 32 seconds
Soundtrack: Rage by BFRND,
Ufo361, Sonus030
Project Name: The Third Tongue
Experimental Video Art
Fall 2025
The Third Tongue is an experimental video work exploring linguistic breakdown within a cultural in-between. As language slips between Mandarin, English, and Spanish, meaning fractures into sound, and visual rhythm. Through layered imagery and interruption, the project examines communication at the moment it fails, lingers, and remains unresolved.
Project Name: Rage
Speculative Design
Spring 2025
This speculative design project imagines a future where revenge is institutionalized as a controlled social mechanism. Through fictional services and systems, it explores how individuals express dissatisfaction through symbolic retaliation, examining th e cyclical relationship between power, repression, and resistance while questioning the ethical boundaries of revenge as social feedback.
Project Name: Illusions of Freshness
Installation
Spring 2025
The installation combines an iron water basin, burning candles, and a looping video projection to explore society's endless pursuit of novelty. The dazzling, ever-changing images reflect fleeting thrills, while the melting candles and eventual digital glitches symbolize exhaustion and emptiness. These material traces reveal the cost of endless consumption and desire.
Project Name: EcoBite
Research-driven Branding
Fall 2025
This project explores the emerging insect-based food industry as a sustainable solution for food security and environmental impact. Through research-driven branding, website architecture, and interactive features-including live production streams and commerce, the project emphasizes transparency and sustainability while aiming to shift public perception and support industry growth.