Congratulations to Castle Lab for making Adobe’s Top Talent list of 2019!
Léo Chazalon, Founder of Castle Lab, presenting at Adobe MAX 2019
Léo Chazalon founded the design studio Castle Lab only two years ago, with no formal background in design. Since then, Castle Lab has quickly gained traction -and attention- picking up clients all over the world.
As a third year UBC student, Léo Chazalon started Castle Lab after meeting his co founders anonymously on the UBC sub-reddit. They shared a desire to build a startup and landed on providing listings feed technology (MLS) to real estate agents across Vancouver. Without any formal training, Léo bravely took up the role of “designer’, teaching himself UX design through Youtube tutorials. This couldn’t have been a further departure from his education as a commerce student at UBC Sauder, but obviously, something clicked!
Fast forward to today, Castle Lab made Adobe’s Top Talent list of 2019, with Léo himself being named one of Adobe’s Top 10 UX Designers to Watch 2019. Castle Lab presented alongside the likes of M. Night Shyamalan, David Grohl and Billie Eilish at Adobe MAX - The Creativity Conference in Los Angeles earlier this November. There, Léo shared his incredible story of starting a design company and scaling it to become an award winning studio through passion and unrelenting curiosity with Castle Lab’s talented team of student designers.
Castle Lab Founder, Léo Chazalon and business partner, Yuki Nishida at Adobe MAX 2019
“I felt more inspired by client work than academics. It’s also the feeling of teaming up with aspiring designers, going through all the ups and downs of building products, and growing together as people and creatives.”
- Léo Chazalon, Founder of Castle Lab
A key tenet of Castle Lab’s philosophy is to bring on talent with non design backgrounds. Because of this, Castle Lab intentionally hires UBC students hailing from all academic disciplines to work on client projects, believing that fresh, exciting and interesting design is born through a diverse workforce. Backgrounds range from electrical engineering to philosophy and Léo hopes exposing students to a new skill set will drive an interest in the unknown, much like his own unique journey.
As an alumni, Castle Lab continues to operate out of entrepreneurship@UBC with their Vancouver branch headed by Yuki Nishida, a full time UBC student and President of the UBC UX Club. They are currently open to new talent - is this you? Get in touch, here.
Congratulations!
Hear Castle Lab’s presentation at Adobe MAX 2019, here
entrepreneurship@UBC (e@UBC) is an initiative that propels UBC innovations out into the world through entrepreneurship, by providing UBC students, researchers, faculty members, alumni and staff with the resources, networks, facilities and funding they need to succeed.