Worldly vision: Creative director Alan Chan finds meaning in every moment

Award-winning creative director Alan Chan may be approaching retirement age, but you wouldn't know it from the more than 20 projects his firm has under way on the mainland.

"The projects in China are very meaningful, from a small tea room to a clubhouse to a private home," says the 63-year-old founder of Alan Chan Design, a leading graphic design house and brand consultancy firm. "It's like the process I went through in the 1980s and '90s in Hong Kong. We dreamt so much about the brand in Hong Kong, and now I am taking on a similar exercise in China."

Chan put Hong Kong on the creative map in the 1980s with his unique East-meets-West designs on products, posters, packaging and interiors. His portfolio includes work for such brands as Bossini, Lee Kum Kee, Coca-Cola China, and the newly opened China Rouge private club at Galaxy Macau, in addition to his own - now-shuttered - retail stores. "We were the first household brand before Shanghai Tang and G.O.D.," he says. "I was the first to cultivate those Shanghai ladies to put on the products."

Chan's design style was inspired by the time he spent working in foreign-owned advertising agencies before he opened his own company, 32 years ago. "I started work at the age of 20. In the 1970s, all the creative agencies were run by expats ... I learned how to enjoy and appreciate Hong Kong's Oriental culture from a Western perspective."