SUNNY LI


A brand designer based in New York City, recently graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Design & Entrepreneurship at the School of Visual Arts. 

Works across brand identity, systems, and creative direction, with a focus on concept-driven storytelling and cohesive brand experiences. Comfortable translating strategy into visuals. 


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Rewire
Case Study

MFA Design Thesis
An emotional translation infrastructure built as a markdown file that turns any large language model into a guided facilitator for family conversations. 

Year
2025 Fall - 2026 Spring
Advisor
Forest Young
/rewire

sex_machina
Case Study

Festival/Event Identity System Design
“sex_machina” is an outdoor concert and festival where virtual assistants read sexual material to attendees – silent disco-style. Guests also have the option to enjoy the performances from private tents. sex_machina will take place in Golden Gate Park for the people of San Francisco and Silicon Valley, more importantly, people who feel alone on Valentine’s Day.

Branding for sex_machina leans heavily into collage, evoking the visual tradition of the Dada movement in a technocentric future. Drawing from Dadaism’s interrogation of humanity’s relationship with machines, sex_machina comments on how much we have integrated technology into our lives, even going as far as to let it inform our desires. 

Collaborated with:
Chudi Zhang
Samyuktha Narayanan
Margaret Sun

Year
2024 Fall
Instructor
Justin Colt 

sex_machina


emoless
Case Study

Brand Identity/Product Design
emoless™ sells emotional silence in a box. From heartbreak blockers to mood flatteners, our products help you function flawlessly—without the baggage of feeling. Think of us as your shortcut to not caring, clinically formulated, and aesthetically optimized.

emoless™ is a fictional brand that satirizes how self optimization culture turns even our emotions into something to be managed, marketed, and consumed. Under capitalism, we are taught to treat feeling as inefficiency, and discomfort as a problem a product can solve. emoless takes that logic to its clinical extreme: a line of mood flatteners and heartbreak blockers that sell emotional numbness as self improvement. Its branding is loud, bright, and unmistakably contemporary, mirroring the seductive, hyper consumerist language of products that promise to fix us. By adopting the exact visual and verbal codes of the culture it critiques, emoless exposes how consumerism sells us an escape from our own feelings, and asks what we lose when we choose to function flawlessly instead of feel.

Year
2025 Spring
Instructor
Matthew David Owens 

emoless


Hot Stuff
Case Study


Campaign Design

SVA MFA Design Venture 2026 Concept.
We are building things that matter and pushing forward together, ready for whatever comes next.

Year
2025 Fall
Instructor
Hilary Greenbaum

Collaborated with:
Samyuktha Narayanan
Elena Mehlman
Hot Stuff


code 06
Case Study


Contemporary Furniture Magazine Identity Design
code 06 (How to read: Code - O - six) is a quarterly publication
of the world's most up-to-date, cutting-edge, furniture and home furnishings from the most high-end to the most novel. Pre-sales of the first issue begin in December 2023.

Black is not just a color, it's what you get when all colors are mixed together. It's sophisticated, it's rich, and it deserves to be studied and analyzed. We look forward to and hope to collect and show more to all. As more and more are collected, the closer we get to the black, #000000.

Year
2023 Fall
Instructor
Eric Baker

code 06



Los Tacos NO.1
Case Study


Restaurant Identity Rebrand
Los Tacos No.1 was created by three close friends from Tijuana, Mexico, and Brawley, California (Sanders, Pineda, and Kyle Cameron). The authentic taste comes from family recipes and from fresh, simple, and tasteful ingredients straight from home. In every taco from Los Tacos No.1, there is a bit of true Mexican culture and flavor. Los Tacos No.1 has been dedicated to bringing the authentic Mexican taco to the East Coast since 2013.

Year
2024 Fall
Instructor
Kevin Brainard
 

Los Tacos NO.1


CUT! Magazine
Case Study


Editorial Design

CUT! Magazine introduces three of the greatest directors/filmmakers of the 21st century. There are stories about their personal life experiences, interviews, and perspectives on life and filmmaking.


AwardGraphis 2025 New Talent
Year
2023 Spring
Instructor
Matthew Lenning
CUT! Magazine



BASIN
Case Study

Editorial/Layout Design
A lucid dream, an unintentional utopia...
Welcome to Basin, a spiritual exploration of the mythical world of bathing. For us, bathing is a temporary escape from reality. It is a ritual where people peel away their shells and return to their original forms.

Our magazine extends to a wide array of genres: Stories, proses, essays, poems…Perfect for floaty, steamy moments.

Collaborated with:
Yushan (Mint) Zhai
Yanfang (Lily) She
Yaning (Leilani) Liu

Year
2024 Fall
Instructor
Justin Colt 

BASIN


LieSpy
Case Study


Product Design/Brand Identity/Ad Campaign

LieSpy is a surveillance tool that listens, analyzes, and cross-checks every word you hear—detecting lies in real-time, exposing deception, and leaving no secrets, whether it’s a tiny fib or a major contradiction.

Privacy? That’s so 2025. You should choose LieSpy because the truth shouldn’t be a mystery. We’re just here to help you make better decisions.

Year
2025 Spring
Instructor
Allan Chochinov

LieSpy