Designer Interview
4 Froen
Chi-An De Leo is a true multicultural & international individual, he speaks 5 languages and has lived in 5 different countries including a major stint of 9 years in the Uk in cities like Cambridge, Exeter & Cambridge.
Could you please tell us more about your art and design background? What made you become an artist/designer? Have you always wanted to be a designer?
Chi-An De Leo is a true multicultural & international individual, he speaks 5 languages and has lived in 5 different countries including a major stint of 9 years in the Uk in cities like Cambridge, Exeter & Cambridge. Wanting to get back to his Vietnamese roots, he made the move back to the country where he spent the early years of his childhood.
Chi-An has a background in Design and Advertising both in Europe and Vietnam. His passion for Design & Communication has helped local brands reach World Class standards. Chi-An met Joshua Breidenbach at Lowe Vietnam and helped him set up the new design division. They built a partnership early on working together on brands such as Nescafe, Prudential, Vinamilk and Unilever. Chi-An went on to set up Rice Creative together with Joshua.
Joshua Breidenbach began his career at global branding powerhouse, Landor Associates. He Quickly became heavily involved in a multitude Branding & packaging assignments for Multinational giants such as P&G Joshua was also nominated to brand and campaign many of Landor’s internal initiatives.
Seeking new challenges, Joshua moved to Asia 5 years ago, accepting an Art Director position at Lowe & Partners Vietnam. Joshua developed 360 Integrated advertising campaigns. After a brief stint in Bangkok, Josh returned to Lowe Vietnam after being asked to build & lead a new design team as Design Director.
A drive to offer clients to the best possible creative solutions led to the founding Rice Creative with Chi-An De Leo.
Can you tell us more about your company / design studio?
Rice Creative is a multidisciplinary design agency set up in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in 2011 by Chi-An De Leo and Joshua Breidenbach. Out of huge global branding & advertising agencies respectively, the duo sought a smaller more personal environment to offer a new set of clients, world-class creative solutions, with emphasis on well informed concept. The Duo have now enlisted a small handpicked team of creative, planning & production talent to expand the reach of the agency. Rice Creative have engaged with number of like minded start up companies including Marou Faiseurs de Chocolat, to give them voice & visual identity. Rice creative plans to remain lean & focused forming long lasting bonds with their select clients to produce striking, long lasting creative work.
What kinds of works do you like designing most?
Rice creative's core practices are in brand identity, art-direction, packaging, interactive, & print.
What was the first thing you designed for a company?
Marou Chocolate was our first client - a designers dream client, a great way to kickstart Rice Creative. Our first meeting was at Samuel Maruta’s house, they showed us their home-made grinder they had set up in the back room & we had our first taste of Marou Chocolate. We got along great & it was the start of a great & long journey. Since all of us we had quit our full-time jobs, we worked out a way to help each other grow and sustain a working relationship. We had a lot of fun coming up with the Marou brand & spent a good few months on the packaging design with many long discussions.
