I am Faming Yi, an independent designer based in Huizhou, China. I have spent two decades on the print side of design — the part where a beautiful file meets a machine and one of them has to give.
Most designers stop where the machine starts. I kept going: dielines, bleed, spot separation, overprint, imposition, proofing, and standing next to a press arguing about a colour that is two points off.
That is why the work here is described in terms of what could have gone wrong. A file that reaches the printer and comes back untouched is the whole job. Everything else is decoration.
A project passed between a designer, a retoucher, a 3D artist, a prepress operator and a web developer loses something at every handover. Briefs drift, files get rebuilt, and the person who understood the original intent is no longer in the room.
I work the other way: the same person who decided the colour decides how it is separated, and how it is described on the website. It is not romantic — it is simply fewer places for a mistake to hide.
To do that at this scale I use modern tooling, including AI, for the parts where it is faster than doing it by hand. What it does not replace is judgement: whether a proof is acceptable, whether a dieline is buildable, whether a translation will break the layout.
Not a list of software. A list of things I can be handed and finish.
This site — design, copy and code — is mine.
Tell me what you are making and what is in the way. If I am not the right person for it, I will say so.