Jason Liu


Jason Liu is an award-winning designer with eight years of experience creating culture-shifting brands around the world.

His work has been shown at the Grammys, Good Morning America, the New York Times, and CNN. Jason is also an exhibited visual artist and published photographer.

Jason is based in Brooklyn by way of DC, LA, Shanghai, and Michigan. He attended the University of Southern California, where he majored in Urban Planning and minored in Architecture.

More about Jason


 Projects
01     The Labor Force
02    AIGA DC Design Week
03    Amnesty USA
 04    Helena
05    Cinema United
06    Personal Work
Ask me about living in Shanghai as a kid, Mac Miller’s discography, postmodern architecture, airline liveries, and basketball.
 New York 
  Los Angeles
  Shanghai


Symbolizing & Systematizing Worker Power

 Scope: Identity, Brand System, Website
Agency: Teal Media, 2025
Art Direction: Ellen Yee
Project Manager: Bri Henry
Brand Messaging: Julianna Lopez 
Developer: Michael Launer
Founded in 2024, The Labor Force is a nimble, organizing nonprofit that unites workers, allies, and activists to strengthen the labor movement. 
As lead brand designer, I designed a powerful mark that modernizes the storied legacy of union organizing and brings it into the 21st century. I also systematized the brand into a website.






A New Organization, an Outdated Identity



 The Labor Force was assembled without a budget, and in just one year, their team raised $600K for labor campaigns, and grown a community of 200K+ subscribers.

However, its identity looked like many others in the space: protest imagery, raised fists, the familiar visual grammar of organizing. We needed to differentiate them from their more traditional peers.  

I devised two brand directions that balanced the tension of evoking the legacy of organized labor without looking dated, both of which were approved by the client without edits.


Exploring the Mark
The mark needed to punch up to institutional unions while staying true to its roots as a scrappy team of Trader Joe’s crew members organizing their co-workers in Louisville, KY.

As I began my sketches, I looked to two key references: traditional Labor Union bugs, and Tré Seal’s VTC Bayard, inspired by signs from the 1963 March On Washington For Jobs and Freedom. The old logo was a wordmark set in VTC Bayard, and the client wanted to retain it.





I pulled apart my exploration into several routes—one was a modern combination mark integrating abstract shapes that alluded to tools. For the second direction, the picket sign emerged as a timeless symbol of the act of unionizing. I arranged it into a hub, expressing the force-multipler effect of worker power.

Next, I turned these two marks into full brand concepts, showing how they would be applied as a system in conjunction with color, type and expressions. For concept 1, I brought in Union Gothic, an open source font from a progressive type foundry.





Assembling Two Distinct Brand Directions
We presented these two brand directions to the client. They liked both, but the concept 2 logo stood out immediately. We agreed, and we proceeded to apply the direction into a full brand guide and website. The client also wanted the color and type from concept 1 in the final brand. We anticipated they’d want to frankenstein some elements, so we kept the rules of each concept flexible. 






Centering the Brand Around the Picket Sign 
The visual system extends the “collective strength” idea beyond the logo into every touchpoint. Photography centers real workers in real moments, not stock imagery. 

The graphic system gives the brand room to be loud when the moment calls for it — high-contrast typographic lockups, bold calls to action, data presented as declaration — while the underlying component logic keeps everything cohesive across social content, merch, and digital.







Systematizing the Brand Online
Final approval was speedy, and we built the website with Teal Media’s Archie product, a specialized platform made for nonprofits, campaigns, and activists who need a website on a quick timeline and a limited budget. Visit it here!






The Future of The Labor Force
“The new branding and website have made a real difference. We show up in coalition spaces and stakeholder meetings with a presence that matches the seriousness of our work. There's a clear before-and-after in how people perceive us, and that's opened doors.”

Jess Kutch, Co-Founder & Senior Advisor, The Labor Force
Designing for The Labor Force was an uncommon alignment of shared values, mutual trust, and operational effectiveness between client and creative. Since they launched the brand, The Labor Force has scaled up their work, protesting Jeff Bezos at the Met Gala, standing up for working Minnesotans threatened by ICE, and supporting Starbucks baristas unionizing around the country. Follow their work here.