In fact, designers aren’t always loyal to the Truth. They’re “rebels.”

If you’ve read Setting Limits for AI in Designing a Historical Yearbook, you’ll have seen a designer doing everything possible to reconstruct the past as accurately as the data allowed.

But there are also times when I need to let my imagination take over, using truth only as raw material.

Take a recent project, for instance: I designed for the Vunahuna2026 National Science Conference. The client needed a Photo Booth. Where attendees could take pictures and instantly recognize Ho Chi Minh City. Specifically the Nguyen Hue flower street.

As a designer, I had to sit down and analyze. What is it about this street that makes people recognize it as Ho Chi Minh City? First, there’s the City Hall building. Without it, the street could be any city street anywhere in the world.

But that alone wasn’t enough for people to recognize Ho Chi Minh City. I needed a more striking, more recognizable landmark. And this is where a designer’s “rebellion” comes in. On the opposite side of City Hall stand the Bitexco and Vietcombank towers — two buildings with such distinctive architecture that almost everyone recognizes them when Ho Chi Minh City comes to mind.

So I did something architects probably wouldn’t be thrilled about. I lifted Bitexco and Vietcombank Tower and placed them behind City Hall. Fortunately, my client didn’t dismiss the idea for being “factually wrong.” They understood what I was doing, and trusted the reasoning behind it.

The idea was that anyone standing in front of the photo booth would look at the image for a few seconds and think, “Ah, Nguyen Hue. Saigon.”

And with that, I’d done something specific: not reconstructed reality, but created a symbol.

The real world has too much to look at. And part of a designer’s job is deciding what other people need to see.

To me, design is a strange profession. Sometimes you have to keep a cool head, and sometimes you get to be a daydreamer. We have our own world. In it, we take material from the real world, reshape it, rearrange it, and build another world — one designed to shape how others see, understand, and feel.

And that’s also one of the things that makes me proud to be a “rebel” Designer.