I’m Royal Lee.
Creative Director, Brand Identity Designer, and Founder of RFL Design Corp out of Queens, New York.
For 20+ years, I've been building visual identities that do more than look good, they work. Across industries, from luxury jewelry to street brands to therapy practices, the process is always the same: understand who you are, understand who's buying from you, then design a system that bridges the gap. I spent 11 years at Apple learning what brand standards look like at global scale. I've designed pieces featured in a NYT-bestselling TASCHEN publication, exhibited at the American Museum of Natural History, and covered by GQ, MTV, and BET. I've created custom jewelry worn by Travis Scott, Lil Wayne, and Hailey Bieber. Now I take everything I've learned building for the biggest names and apply it to businesses that are ready to look like what they actually are.
How I Work
The Process
Every project starts with a conversation, not a mood board, not a brief, not a quote. A conversation.
Before I sketch anything, I need to understand your business, your audience, your competition, and your gut feeling about where you're headed. That conversation shapes everything that follows. From there: design brief, initial concepts, revisions, and a final identity system you can use across every touchpoint — signage, social, packaging, print, digital. The timeline is typically 30-60 days, and I'm hands-on from start to finish. I don't hand you a logo and disappear. I build you a system.
What I Won’t Do
I don't skip the conversation. I don't send four generic sketches off a text message and call it a project. If a client doesn't want the discovery process, they don't want me. And that's fine.
Three things every project needs: integrity, alignment, and narrative. If those aren't there, neither am I.
