As 2025 draws to a close, the global design industry is entering its peak awards season, with juries around the world celebrating the year’s most compelling creative achievements. Among this year’s standout winners is TinyPrep, an innovative project by product/UX designer Bingyi Liu, which has been honored with a 2025 Red Dot Award in the Brands & Communication Design category. The Red Dot, one of the world's most prestigious design competitions with nearly 70 years of history, is among the highest recognitions in the industry. TinyPrep's win highlights its exceptional creative quality on the international stage, distinguishing it among thousands of submissions worldwide.
This Red Dot Award caps off a remarkable year of accolades for TinyPrep. In 2025, the project earned a Silver at the London Design Awards, Gold and Silver honors at the MUSE Design Awards, a New York Design Award, the TITAN Innovation Award. Such a sweep of awards, spanning UX, product, branding, and innovation, underlines TinyPrep's wide acclaim and cross-disciplinary achievements.
TinyPrep is a digital solution that personalizes meal planning for children with special care needs, combining nutritional insight with user-friendly design. The platform's empathetic approach and clarity of execution have resonated with judges across these competitions. Together, the 2025 honors signal that TinyPrep delivers not only innovative concept and polished visuals, but also meaningful real-world impact through design.
Bingyi Liu, the creator of TinyPrep, is a Senior UX Designer currently working with biopharmaceutical company Eli Lilly & Co. via New Era Technology. At Lilly, she leads user experience initiatives on complex healthcare projects. Her career spans work at companies like Aptiv (where she drove design for connected vehicle software) and even tech giants like YouTube and Coca-Cola, delivering solutions that connect with diverse users worldwide. This broad experience in enterprise and high-tech domains has shaped Liu's human-centered approach to tackling complex problems.
Born and raised in Liaoyang, China, Liu moved to the United States for her education. She earned her bachelor's degree at Michigan State University and went on to obtain a Master of Science in Information (HCI specialization) from the University of Michigan. That academic foundation, including a formative UX design course that showed her design's power to improve quality of life, set the stage for her career mission. "The ultimate goal of UX design is to bring solutions from complex to simple," Liu has noted, reflecting a philosophy of clarity and problem-solving.
Today, Liu's design philosophy is grounded in empathy, clarity, and real-world impact. Experts describe her as a forward-thinking designer dedicated to transforming complexity into engaging, human-centered experiences. She excels at bridging the gap between business objectives and user needs, ensuring that even highly technical products remain intuitive and accessible.
Liu's portfolio showcases a passion for solving real problems in complex sectors like healthcare and enterprise technology. One standout example is a recent project at Eli Lilly: Liu led the UX design of a digital training tool for a gene-therapy device used to treat children with a rare disease. Doctors must perform this therapy in a single precise procedure, so Liu's task was to create an interactive training experience that makes the high-stakes medical workflow clear, intuitive, and rigorous. Working closely with medical experts, she developed a step-by-step simulation with visual guidance and feedback, helping physicians quickly master the procedure before treating patients. The high-fidelity prototype earned praise in internal trials and was celebrated as a major step forward in physician training. Liu regards this as a career milestone – a project that showed how design can literally save lives by acting as a "bridge" in healthcare, giving doctors more confidence and patients more assurance.
Liu's expertise in empathetic innovation is further evident in her previous award-winning work. In 2024, she was part of the team behind Hear Me, an AI-based mobile assistant for people with hearing or speech disabilities. Hear Me integrates sign-language avatars, real-time captioning, and mood tracking to empower the deaf and non-vocal community. The project earned multiple international accolades, including a Red Dot Design Concept award for its interaction and UX design. This recognition, along with honors from other competitions, highlighted Liu's dedication to inclusive design that addresses the needs of often-overlooked users.
With TinyPrep's Red Dot triumph, Bingyi Liu joins the ranks of globally recognized designers. Industry observers note that winning a Red Dot Award – widely regarded as a design "Oscar" – is a career-defining achievement, signifying that a project meets the highest international standards of quality and creativity. For Liu, the honor is one more validation of her user-centered ethos. She has proven that design grounded in empathy and clarity can excel across domains, from helping families manage special-needs nutrition to bridging communication gaps for the deaf.
Liu's journey from Liaoyang to the world's biggest design stages is an inspiring testament to the power of human-focused design. She has shown that thoughtful UX can turn even the most complex challenges into intuitive solutions and garner global accolades in the process. As TinyPrep continues to draw praise, Liu remains focused on what got her here: a belief that good design not only looks or works better, but truly makes people's lives better.
This article was written in cooperation with Claire Whitmore