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Yiying Lu is a graphic designer and artist most known for creating the 2008 Twitter Fail Whale, co-creating the dumpling emoji, and co-founding Emojination. She was born in Shanghai, China and earned her Bachelor of Design from University of Technology Sydney in Australia. She is based in San Francisco, CA.

Career
Yiying Lu has been using art, design, and technology to create cross-cultural connections that unite people across language and cultural barriers. After earning her bachelor’s degree from University of Technology Sydney in 2008, Lu founded the Yiying Lu Studio.

While earning her degree, Lu created an original digital artwork titled "Lifting a Dreamer" to send birthday wishes to a friend living far away. Lu then posted the image, featuring a serene whale being lifted out of the water by eight orange birds, to a istockphoto.com, where Twitter co-founder Biz Stone discovered the image and thought it would make a great icon. In May of 2008 the image of a serene whale being lifted out of the water became the Twitter Fail Whale.

Due to the popularity of the fail whale, Conan O’Brien commissioned Conan O’Brien Pale Whale for Conan O’Brien’s Team Coco website and Twitter page. The image sparked an internet sensation, including a profile page and fan club for the fail whale. In July of 2008, Mashable held a competition for users to create an icon for Facebook based on the fail whale. Lu also created the Shorty Whale for the social media Shorty Awards, another outgrowth of the fail whale.

Her work bridging design and technology continued when in 2011 she created a set of illustrations of famous faces in fashion featuring QR codes.

In 2015 Lu co-founded the Dumpling Project and Emojination with Jennifer Lee. Between 2015 and 2020, Lu created six Unicode emojis now used by billions of people. These are the dumpling 🥟, boba tea 🧋, fortune cookie 🥠, chopsticks 🥢, takeout box 🥡, and peacock 🦚, representing sights, foods, beverages, images, and animals common in Asia and Asian American communities.

In 2016 she designed a version of Mickey Mouse for the inaugural recruitment campaign for Disney Shanghai Resort.

In 2024, Yiying Lu, Steve Sue, and Ryan Ozawa, submitted the Shaka emoji to the unicode Consortium to bolster the reach of the famous gesture from Hawaiian culture. The emoji is based on the call me emoji.

The 2024 San Francisco public art exhibit, Disco Winter Wonder Land & Sea, is a playful and whimsical celebration of the winter holiday season and animal inhabitants from different continents. The art piece includes iconic north pole animals such as the polar bear, red panda, koala, and whale shark intended to delight San Francisco locals and visitors and to promote biological diversity and ocean conservation through engagement and education.

Yiying Lu serves as a San Francisco Arts Commissioner for visual arts. She is a frequent guest speaker and visiting lecturer.

She has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, Bloomberg, Fast Company, The Atlantic, NBC News, TIME, Wired Magazine, The Verge, CNN, and BBC.

Honors and Awards
Yiying Lu has been honored and featured by various organizations and publications including Fast Company, Microsoft, The New York Times, Forbes, Bloomberg, Fast Company, The Atlantic, NBC News, TIME, Wired Magazine, The Verge, CNN, and BBC.

She has also won the following awards for her work.


 * 2009 Top 10 Emerging Leading in Innovation from the Microsoft Next 100 series [need citation]
 * 2018 Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business Winner
 * 2019 Shorty Awards winner in Design Where she presented Shorty Awards’ a new mascot, Shorty Whale (Twitter’s Fail Whale cousin), based on the Shorty Awards’ logo designed by Aaron Taylor-Waldman.
 * 2022 Australia China Alumni Award for the Arts and Creative Industries
 * 2024 Pantone Spotlight Artist "Color is my language, weaving bridges between hearts and minds, connecting individuals through shared emotions, and orchestrating a symphony of unity and understanding." Yiying Lu