Vera Li, a Founding Product Designer at Gemini Legal and creator with over 260,000 followers, has won four international design awards for her social app concept, Season.
Inspired by her experiences across China, Singapore, and the United States, Season explores a different way of building online communities.
Unlike traditional social platforms, Season’s communities dissolve and re-form every 30 days, allowing connections to evolve as people do.
Building Communities Across Borders
Vera received Gold at the London Design Awards and Tokyo Design Awards, along with Silver at the MUSE Design Awards and NY Product Design Awards. Her concept, Season, challenges how traditional social platforms work. Instead of keeping people in the same online communities indefinitely, Season’s communities dissolve and re-form every 30 days, allowing users to connect with people who reflect who they are at that point in their lives.
The idea comes from Vera’s own experiences of moving between countries and building new connections.
She grew up in a small town in rural Henan, a farming province in central China, before her family moved to Zhengzhou, the provincial capital. At 15, she earned the Singapore government’s SM1 full-ride scholarship and spent four years studying abroad, far from home and everyone she knew. She later moved to the United States to attend UCLA, once again finding herself in a new environment where she had to build her own community.
Each move taught her something about belonging. The people and places around her changed, but she continued finding ways to connect with others.
Finding Connection Through Dance and Design
Dance became one of Vera’s earliest ways of bringing people together. At UCLA, she founded dance teams, organized dance camps across four international cities, and taught dance in Los Angeles.
She also performed as a backup dancer at major events, including the MAMA Awards and KCON, sharing stages with artists such as J.Y. Park, ITZY, IVE, and ZICO. She also shared the stage with AESPA at Long Beach Arena.
These experiences showed her how people from different backgrounds could come together through a shared interest, even if only for a short time.
Vera eventually brought that same experience online. Through @VeraLiStudio on YouTube and @vera_shalala on TikTok and Instagram, she built a community of more than 260,000 followers around dance and movement, connecting people across languages and cultures.
Her interest in building meaningful experiences later led her into product design. She moved to Pittsburgh to pursue a Master of Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University before returning to Los Angeles.
For the past three years, Vera has worked as the sole Founding Product Designer at Gemini Legal, a legal technology company. She has led design initiatives for several products from concept to launch, most recently the company’s legal drafting tool, DraftEngine.
Working as a one-person design team also meant creating a design culture of her own. When she noticed a lack of opportunities for designers in Los Angeles to share their work and connect, she organized “Designers in the Age of AI,” an event that attracted hundreds of designers.
A New Approach to Online Communities
Vera’s experiences across different cities, dance communities, and product design eventually shaped Season.
The concept draws inspiration from the Japanese aesthetic principle Mono no Aware (物の哀れ), which recognizes the bittersweet beauty of things that do not last forever.
Rather than encouraging users to maintain permanent online communities, Season allows groups to naturally end and form again every 30 days. The idea reflects Vera’s belief that relationships and communities can remain meaningful even as they change.
“I have spent my whole life walking into rooms full of strangers and turning them into places where people belong,” Vera shares.
“Every one of those communities had a season. Some friendships lasted, but the room itself always changed. Season is the first time I designed software that tells the truth about that instead of pretending the room is permanent.”
This fall, Vera moved to San Francisco, marking another chapter in her career. She has also begun a Doctor of Business Administration with a concentration in Applied Computer Science, focusing her research interests on human-centered design and how digital products can better serve their communities.
Her work in design is also opening new opportunities. Vera was recently invited to join the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS) and will soon begin judging the Webby Awards.
For Vera, the same principle continues to guide her work: great design is always intentional, and the people using it should be able to feel the difference.
Follow Vera’s journey in rethinking digital connections.
