OUTSIDE/IN is a design exhibition presented by Hello Human and Lyle Gallery for NYCxDesign 2025. The show explores what it means to belong in design and questions who decides who is considered part of the industry. The curators set out to spotlight a rising generation of independent designers who often operate beyond traditional networks of validation. Their practices draw from personal identity, heritage crafts, unconventional material choices, and experimental approaches to making. The exhibition’s voice and visual identity needed to honor this position and express a sense of creative autonomy, cultural specificity, and resistance to standard definitions of design excellence.

Studio Loutsis began the project by reviewing the curatorial framework and discussing the intentions of both presenting partners. Through creative sessions with Hello Human and Lyle Gallery, we clarified the core themes that needed to be expressed: belonging, visibility, and the power of outsider perspectives. The team identified the importance of rejecting traditional hierarchies in favor of a more expansive view of design that celebrates identity, storytelling, and lived experience. These insights shaped the brand strategy and exhibition profile, which served as the foundation for the visual identity, graphics, and communication materials.

The exhibition brings together 13 artists and designers whose work challenges expectations of materiality, form, and cultural reference. Featured designers include Aliyah Salmon, Inderjeet Sandhu, Jaye Kim, Jirah Joshua, Kawabi, Monica Curiel, Platform Studio, Salù Iwadi Studio, soft-geometry, Studio Tenjung, Tanuvi Hegde, unown space, and Vy Voi. Their works range from sculptural lighting inspired by Vietnamese folk traditions to furniture that also functions as a therapeutic tool for anxiety. Each piece reinforces the exhibition’s central idea that outsider status can be a source of creative strength.

Studio Loutsis developed the visual identity system by grounding the concept in how each participating artist navigates and reshapes the social, political, and cultural structures that surround them. The foundational graphic device became a twelve-part grid, a direct reflection of the twelve designers in the exhibition. Rather than treating the grid as a fixed framework, it was designed as a structural metaphor: a system that represents the rigid boundaries many artists must work within, yet one that can be bent, challenged, and reimagined.

Imagery and typography were intentionally woven in and out of this grid, slipping across its borders and breaking its alignment. This movement mirrors the lived experiences of the designers, each of whom exists within established systems while simultaneously pushing against them. Some visuals press tightly within the grid, others bleed past its edges, and others inhabit both spaces at once. The result is a visual language that not only identifies the exhibition but also expresses the way these artists navigate identity, visibility, materiality, and belonging.