My name is Gu Jian. I am the owner and head designer of GU DESIGN - a Stockholm-based design studio providing premium web design, and branding services.
I was born with a burning passion for aesthetics. From a very young age, I couldn’t help choosing a book by its cover and food by its presentation. Every Saturday afternoon in my teenage years, I would pay the entrance fee to read about international design at the only foreign language bookstore in my home town for hours and hours, standing. There is nothing in the world that mesmerizes me more than form, color and beauty. At 14, my dream was to become an interior designer.
At 18, however, when the time came to choose my undergraduate subject, like most Chinese kids, I had to bend to my parents’ will to study something they thought held a future for me. For them, it was Engineering and Management of Information Systems. It wasn’t a terrible subject really, I learned intensively about IT and business, the latter of which I enjoyed immensely although my design instinct was still burning inside of me. I always went to great lengths, sometimes spending more time than on doing the actual project, on designing all the documents and presentation slides I needed to hand in. So later when I told my engineer classmates that I had started my company doing designs, literally none of them was surprised.
After finishing the bachelor’s degree in China and a master’s degree in Sweden on the same subject, I finally got to choose my own path and enrolled in another master’s program about Art and Technology where I went on to learn the magic and wonders of arts and design. It was only until when a classmates with fine art background really couldn’t get how a database works (which was obvious to me) that I realized my understanding of both technology and art is not a given. My ability to quickly grasp the opportunities and limitations coming from technology, as well as business and marketing concepts became my foundation for achieving the kind of simplicity I always love - simple but interesting, simple but with great functionality, simple but fulfiling all business purposes.
The dots of my life connected. After years of searching, I have actually landed exactly where I belong – the intersection of art, technology and business. With successful projects completed for world-class art dealers, designers, artists, events and different businesses, we continue to deliver simple, unique and friendly designs as we have done for over 8 years.