Kelvin Soh

INFO

Name	Kelvin Soh (he/him)
Born	1974
Country of Birth	Malaysia
Place of Residence	Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
Ethnicities	Malaysian Chinese
Artform	Design
Decades Active	2000s, 2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Kelvin Soh is a graphic designer, creative director and brand strategist. Although based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, he has a global outlook, producing work for international audiences and helping local brands find their niche in a global context. As well as contributing to the development of well-known brands through his studio DDMMYY, Soh is the publisher of the independent art and culture magazine, Le Roy, and the Creative Director of STILL, a growing conglomerate of New Zealand businesses led by Hideaki Fukutaki.

Soh was born in Malaysia, and his family moved to Tāmaki Makaurau when he was a young child. He undertook an undergraduate degree in graphic design at AIT (now AUT) and has been self-employed since graduating in the mid-1990s.

In 1999, Soh founded the design studio DDMMYY, and between 2003 and 2010 he was also a founding partner in the design group The Wilderness. Soh has developed the identities for a number of now well-known New Zealand brands such as Stolen Rum, 42 Below, Deadly Ponies, Sans Ceuticals, Charlies Juice, Klim Type Foundry and Metro magazine when it was relaunched in 2020. Of his approach to design, Soh said in 2015 that, “after 20 years, I’ve decided that what constitutes success for me, and in our practice, is whether something is surprising or interesting.” Work produced through the DDMMYY studio has garnered many Best Design Awards (70+ since 2012) and Soh has been made a Fellow of the Designers Institute of NZ.

Between 2000 and 2010, Soh participated in and curated several exhibitions, working with ST Paul St, the Adam Art Gallery, the Govett-Brewster and Artspace. As a designer, he also worked on print materials for New Zealand’s presentation at the Venice Biennale in 2005. The following year, Soh worked with Tiger Beer to create Tiger Translate — an international arts programme. The multi-year series produced events in cities around the world (including Tāmaki Makaurau) that featured contemporary artists from Asia (spanning art, design, film, and music).

During this time, Soh began studying at Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, gaining an MFA in 2012. In an interview with Design Assembly, he talked about how his interest in going to art school developed from working on the Venice Biennale project — and thinking about how the reflexive nature of art practice could be applied to design. He said he was “curious about a more critical way of thinking about design, and a more conceptual way or a more theoretical way of thinking about design” more often found in the disciplines of art and architecture.

In 2014, DDMMYY created and began publishing Le Roy magazine. The magazine was conceived as a non-profit project, designed to showcase emerging artistic talent. This was sparked by Soh’s observation that the studio’s book projects were often for established artists, as emerging artists had more difficulty securing funding. This project allowed DDMMYY to support less established talent by directing profits from commercial projects to the magazine. As with DDMMYY, which sees Soh working across fashion, beauty, food, beverage and publishing brands, Le Roy’s content spans many genres. It is distributed internationally, including in gallery bookshops such as the Tate Modern and MoMA.

Building on his success working with companies on their brand strategies, Soh founded New New with Jamie Duff of Stolen Rum in 2016. New New, which operated until 2022, worked between Los Angeles and Aotearoa, with “early stage and growth companies” to help them build global brands.

In 2022, DDMMYY was acquired by STILL, a unique business conglomerate founded by the Fukutake family, which aims to “start or acquire 100 companies that are fundamentally good for New Zealand”. When DDMMYY joined STILL, Soh took on the role of the parent company’s Creative Director. As in his own work, STILL’s interests are varied, spanning art, nature, infrastructure and culture, and Soh has said, “I've always maintained a holistic view of practice—balancing commercial with cultural projects—and joining STILL in 2021 was such a natural fit on a much grander scale.” Hideaki Fukutake cited Soh’s entrepreneurial nous and the reach of DDMMYY’s work beyond Aotearoa among the reasons why STILL was interested in the studio, as well as saying, “On a long list of reasons why DDMMYY was the right creative agency for Still is the non-profit work that Kelvin has done with artists and writers.”