Vol 15. Insights from Asana’s Head of Interactive Design

Meet Chean Wei Law

Each week, we sit down with a marketing leader to learn more about their career, insights, and accomplishments. This week, that marketing leader is Chean Wei Law.

Chean started his career as a designer and is now Creative Director. He worked at several renowned agencies over the course of 13 years before getting his very first experience on the brand side at one of the largest brands in the world. Here are the need-to-knows about Chean:

• Within two years of starting his design career career, he was brought on as Art Director at Wieden + Kennedy to help shape and expand their presence in the digital space. 

• He oversaw the Meta for Business website, which educates businesses on how they could partner with Facebook and its other lines of business (Instagram, WhatsApp, etc).

• In his current role at Asana, he leads the web and email design team, overseeing how the brand shows up across digital touchpoints.

Design philosophies 

Chean studied graphic design at Ringling College of Art and Design. He had always been fascinated with design as an interactive language to communicate with others. 

Though he wasn’t motivated to get into advertising specifically, he saw the opportunity it offered to have a mutual conversation with the audience through design. So when he connected with Crispin (former Crispin, Porter + Bogusky) after graduation and they shared their approach of disruption and connecting with audiences, Chean was very aligned. 

“The philosophy at Crispin is very similar to my own. That’s what drew me in,” Chean said. “There, I actually started to understand how to leverage creative thinking and design thinking to apply it to advertising and marketing.”

After getting his initial agency experience at Crispin, Chean went over to JWT as their Art Director. In that role, he got to learn about working with very large clients and how that impacts workflow processes. “JWT tended to do more testing, even before we put an idea out. At the time, they were more traditional in that sense.”

From there, Chean was brought on as Art Director at Wieden + Kennedy during a time when they were looking to expand beyond traditional advertising channels and into more digital storytelling. 

“Wieden + Kennedy is well known for being great at storytelling. When I came on, I was pushing digital.”

Moving on to Meta

After a 13-year run in the agency world, Chean was growing more and more curious about what the brand side was like. 

“I loved my agency experience because it focuses so much on the creative. There’s so much creative energy and it’s a collective space for a lot of interesting creative minds. But oftentimes, we all share the same mindset,” Chean said. 

“On the other side, in a larger environment, there are opportunities to answer some interesting questions. Could the creative be closer to the brief? Could the creative understand the brand a bit better? I wanted to try a different challenge in my journey and get those answers.”

Landing at Meta (known then as Facebook) as his first brand side experience, Chean saw some big differences in the work process and structure. 

“How we navigate, how we engage with other teams is very different. In house, you kind of put on two hats—you have a creative hat but since you also work with agencies sometimes too, you also put on a client hat. You have to understand what you want to bring in as an internal creative, but when you work with an agency, you also have to know how to position it to them as well.”

In his role working on the Meta for Business website, Chean seized a huge opportunity and a huge challenge, all at once. “I saw the website as a platform to have an experience, connect with the audience, and tell the business story. But it was also a platform that has to scale to different regions, teams, partners, businesses, and audiences—it was just massive.”

A single brand focus 

After nearly four years at Meta, which had several other brands within the portfolio, Chean went over to Asana where there’s numerous products, but only one brand.

Chean’s been leading his team and working with an agency to reimage this new brand position and brand expression in the digital space. And he said throughout that process, there are two things he’s advocated for in his vision. 

"One is to deeply understand our users and design every experience with intention. Crafting intuitive, engaging journeys that are grounded in real user needs and best practices,” he said. “The second is to express our brand with a clear, distinctive voice that sets us apart in the category and makes the experience feel uniquely Asana."

Those two questions ladder up to Chean’s larger vision for interactive design. “Interactive design, to me, is to really understand the medium format, the problem you’re solving for, and connecting the solution with the customer.”

When it comes to measuring his team’s success, Chean said that creativity is actually benchmarked in the same way in the brand side as it is agency side. “There’s so much data that we can use to understand what’s doing well and what isn’t. And those are actually part of the brief now. In-house, though, I think we get a more holistic review because we look at both the creative and the business side.”

A standout campaign

Of all his design work throughout the years, Chean said the Meta for Business website has a special place in his portfolio. The website was originally started by an engineer so it functioned very well but not in a way that expressed the brand. 

The whole goal of the Meta for Business site was to give advertisers a place to get information about how to leverage Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, or WhatsApp. So essentially, Chean was building an onboarding experience for one of the fastest growing advertising platforms in the world. 

To do that, Chean put a vision on the website that reimagined and transformed it. The website had to exist in a design system that was easily scalable and operational with teams across global regions and within different sub-brand teams. So flexibility and speed were very very important. 

The project took over two years to complete, but he said the complexity and immensity of it is one of the reasons he loves it so much. “The outcome of it was great because we did transform the website in a very positive, very creative way, and increased business metrics.”

_{Subscriber Perk}

Delegate your next agency RFP (and get $100!)

Finding the right agency for your brand doesn’t have to mean 20+ hours of calls.

With Case Studied’s agency matchmaking service, we’ll provide you a shortlist of the 3 best agencies for your brand in less than 15 minutes. At no cost to you.

Plus you’ll receive an $100 Amazon Gift card when you discover why Estée Lauder, Magic Spoon and F1 trust Case Studied to find great agencies.

Advice and takeaways

1) Make interactivity a North star. 

Chean has remained focused on interactivity throughout his entire creative career. Whether it’s a website, an ad, or a TikTok, he asks: How can this be a two-way conversation?

To stay rooted in interactivity, continuously ask how intuitive and engaging your touchpoints are. Create clear guardrails that help your team consistently speak with your audience, not at them. It's good to ensure every interaction feels meaningful and two-way.

2) Align brand evolution with digital expression.

At Asana, Chean’s focus is on helping the brand mature into an enterprise-ready platform, without losing its creative edge. That means rethinking not just what the site says, but how it looks, feels, and flows.

If your company is evolving, don’t just update the messaging. Consider how the design, experience, and tone reinforce that evolution. Every touchpoint is a chance to express your brand’s maturity, values, and intent.

3) Connect creativity to user behavior.

Chean’s approach to digital is rooted in understanding customer behavior and building creative design around that. Whether it’s building microsites in the early 2000s or designing for social media engagement today, he adapts based on how people actually consume content.

There’s a wealth of insights at marketing’s disposal today. Is your creative team using them in the most effective way? If not, consider the ways you can adjust that behavior and build a culture where data and creativity are more symbiotic.

Find Your Fit: Vendry connects marketing teams with top-tier creative agencies for brand, experiential, and content work. Brief once, get matched fast, and meet the right partners without endless searching.