Turning design into a game

He likes the platform as the background of the designers does not matter.

"It is a place that gives young designers a chance to show their talent," says Luan, who won a contest to design a logo for a children's education company on the platform.

"They sent our work to the kids who studied at the educational institution, which makes the result more credible."

Luan, 24, moved to Beijing just before Peng, after he graduated from the Dalian Neusoft University of Information this June.

"As design straddles art and science, and a designer's work is not regular, Whale Design is a way for the best designers to be selected for a project," Luan says. "The platform is quite new and I want to see how far it can go. Besides, I can join competitions at the same time."

Whale Design has competitions in various categories, including graphics, illustration, clothes, space and products, so Luan says he can learn from his colleagues-professional designers in other fields. One of those is Wang Simin, founder of Whale Design.

"He is good at balancing design and presenting it which I need to work on," says Luan.

Before he came back to China in 2015, Wang, 31, used to work at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, an architecture, urban planning and engineering firm in New York. Wang studied civil engineering at the University of Michigan, and then went on to study architecture at Cornell University, where he gained his master's degree in 2014.