DMY International Design Festival Berlin: one festival, a world of exhibitors
DMY Berlin is an international design festival with a very mixed audience: local German visitors and a global, largely non-German-speaking design crowd. As a design intern working directly with the Marketing Director, I helped produce the show catalog and festival booklet — and independently designed the show map, exhibitor badges for thousands of participants, and the festival's web banners.
01Context
A festival catalog is a working document: visitors navigate the event with it, and exhibitors — from many countries — are represented by it. My responsibility sat at the editorial heart of that document: collecting and organizing work images from exhibitors across countries, then working out the catalog's curation and layout in close discussion with the marketing and design directors. The catalog had to do justice to every exhibitor's work while holding together as one coherent, bilingual publication.
02What I did
- Exhibitor content curation: collected and organized work images from exhibitors across many countries — chasing down assets, standardizing formats and quality, and preparing selections so every exhibitor was properly represented in the catalog.
- Editorial layout, in dialogue: worked out the catalog's structure and page layouts in close discussion with the marketing and design directors — how to sequence exhibitors, balance image-heavy spreads, and keep hundreds of different works feeling like one publication.
- Show map — designed independently: wayfinding for a venue and city I barely knew. With no local knowledge to lean on, accuracy had to come from process: round after round of verification with German colleagues, correcting and re-checking until every hall, zone, and route was right.
- Exhibitor badges at scale: badges for thousands of participants from many countries — each carrying a name, a work, and an exhibition zone that had to be correct. Zero-tolerance detail work, verified systematically rather than by hope. Also designed the festival's web banners.
- Working across a language barrier: as a non-German speaker on a German team, collaborated closely with German-speaking colleagues and used translation resources to keep the catalog's messaging accurate — and learned to communicate design decisions across a language gap.
03The work
Show catalog
One spread per exhibitor: work images I collected and curated from studios and schools across countries, set alongside bilingual German–English descriptions and practical visitor information.
Festival program booklet
04Why this project matters
This internship was where a career-long thread started: working across cultures and languages. At DMY I was curating exhibitors' work from many countries, and collaborating as a non-German speaker inside a German-speaking team — learning firsthand how design decisions get made, communicated, and defended across a language gap. The show map taught me a discipline I still use: when designing for a context you don't personally know, accuracy comes from process — asking, verifying, and correcting with the people who do know. That became the shape of my career: localizing a U.S. brand's e-commerce for the Taiwanese market at Costco, then adapting one global system across 8 APAC markets at Melaleuca — designing for Korean regulations and Japanese conventions the same way I once mapped Berlin: by checking with the locals, twice.
One festival, exhibitors from everywhere — the first version of a question I've been answering ever since: how does one publication, one site, one system speak to completely different audiences at once?