Rich Tu on Designing the Official FIFA World Cup 2026 New York/New Jersey Poster & His Creative Journey

Rich Tu joins Tarik Talk to reveal the story behind his official FIFA World Cup 2026 New York/New Jersey poster, his creative process, Filipino heritage, and career in art and design.

Artist, designer, creative director, and educator Rich Tu joins Tarik Talk to discuss the story behind his official FIFA World Cup 2026 New York/New Jersey Host City poster, his Filipino-American identity, New Jersey upbringing, career in design, and the creative journey that brought him to one of the world’s biggest sporting events.

In this episode of Tarik Talk, Rich Tu opens up about a creative career that moves fluidly between art, illustration, advertising, education, and cultural storytelling.

Tu describes himself as an artist, designer, creative director, and educator. He serves as an executive creative director and partner at Sunday Afternoon and teaches in the BFA Design program at New York City’s School of Visual Arts. His recent commissioned work includes one of the most visible projects of his career: the official FIFA World Cup 2026 New York/New Jersey Host City poster.

But the conversation goes far beyond a single poster. It traces the experiences, family influences, cultural identity, and creative philosophy that ultimately shaped the artist behind it.

Growing Up Creative in New Jersey

Tu was raised in New Jersey by Filipino immigrant parents.

Creativity entered his life early. His father was an architect and became the first person to teach him how to draw. Those early lessons introduced Tu to continuous-line drawing, a technique he would later encounter again through formal art education.

As a child, he immersed himself in comic books, movies, television, and popular culture. He originally imagined becoming a comic-book illustrator, spending hours reading comics while his father visited hobby shops around New Jersey.

Comics also taught him something that would remain essential throughout his career: visual storytelling.

The ability to communicate a story through a sequence of carefully constructed images eventually translated into commercial campaigns, design, advertising, and creative direction.

Rich Tu’s official FIFA World Cup 2026 New York/New Jersey poster featuring the Statue of Liberty torch and sampaguita floral references.

From Rutgers to the School of Visual Arts

Tu did not initially pursue a traditional undergraduate art degree. He studied communication and psychology at Rutgers University before moving to New York City to earn his graduate degree at the School of Visual Arts.

That path eventually brought him full circle.

Today, he teaches design at SVA while simultaneously maintaining his professional work as an artist and creative director.

His career demonstrates how creative disciplines can overlap rather than exist in isolation. Illustration informs advertising. Art influences branding. Storytelling shapes design. Teaching reinforces creative thinking.

Creativity as Problem-Solving

One of the central ideas in Tu’s practice is that creativity often begins with a problem.

For commercial projects, he approaches the process through conversation—listening carefully to what a client is trying to communicate before determining the visual solution.

Personal projects work differently.

An idea may arrive unexpectedly and become something he fixates on, gradually building an entire creative structure around it.

That distinction between commissioned and personal work reveals an important part of Tu’s approach: the process changes, but curiosity remains constant.

Filipino Identity and Visual Energy

Tu also reflects on how his Filipino heritage has influenced his visual language.

Rather than feeling that every project must contain an obvious cultural symbol, he describes the influence as something deeper—an energy or vibration within the work.

His designs often need to communicate from a distance.

He calls this the “20-foot read”: does the image immediately work from 20 feet away, and when someone moves closer, are there enough details to reward further investigation?

That balance between boldness and detail becomes essential to his visual identity.

The Call From FIFA

The opportunity to create the New York/New Jersey poster began with an email.

Tu recalls being contacted by Carly Gruenberg of the New York/New Jersey Host Committee and asked whether he would be interested in designing the official poster.

His answer was immediate: yes.

The next day, he joined a conversation with members of the Host Committee and FIFA to discuss the poster initiative, the symbolism of the World Cup, and what hosting the tournament meant specifically for New York and New Jersey.

There was also an unusual creative challenge.

Unlike the other host-city posters, this design needed to represent two places at once: New York and New Jersey.

Finding the Symbol: The Statue of Liberty

The Statue of Liberty became the visual anchor.

For Tu, Lady Liberty works on several levels: she is a global icon, an American symbol, a physical presence between New York and New Jersey, and an enduring symbol of immigration.

That last connection carries particular resonance within Tu’s own story as the son of Filipino immigrants.

The poster’s central image became the Statue of Liberty’s torch, surrounded by a larger visual language connecting the two host regions.

Building the New York/New Jersey Poster

At the center of the torch is a patchwork soccer ball, which Tu explains represents the world converging in New York and New Jersey for the World Cup.

Around it are layers of regional symbolism.

Florals reference New Jersey’s identity as the Garden State. An apple represents New York’s Big Apple. The Statue of Liberty appears throughout the composition alongside additional references to specific locations.

But Tu also inserted something personal.

Among the floral elements is a reference to the sampaguita, the national flower of the Philippines.

It allows his own Filipino heritage to exist within a poster simultaneously representing New York, New Jersey, international football, and a global audience.

A Global Event Becomes Personal

For Tu, creating the poster changed his relationship with the World Cup itself.

He describes realizing that he had become connected to a global tradition extending across generations and that his relationship with soccer and international football would never be quite the same again.

The project also demonstrates something fundamental about design: a successful image can communicate at several scales simultaneously.

The poster represents FIFA.

It represents New York.

It represents New Jersey.

It speaks to immigration and cultural convergence.

And embedded within it is the personal history of the artist who created it.

Beyond FIFA: The Whitney Museum

The World Cup project also opened new creative opportunities.

Tu discusses collaborating with the Whitney Museum on poster-making programming connected to his FIFA work. He created an educational foldout designed to explain the basic process of making a poster for children and families while sharing part of his own story.

The project extends his design practice into education—connecting professional visual communication with the next generation of artists and designers.

Art, Design, Advertising, and Technology

Throughout the conversation, Tu refuses to place creativity inside a single category.

His career includes commissioned artwork, advertising campaigns, brand identity, teaching, illustration, filmmaking, augmented reality, and experimentation with artificial intelligence.

That multidisciplinary approach reflects the creative world he grew up consuming.

Comic books became storytelling lessons.

Drawing with his father became a foundation for illustration.

Communication and psychology informed his understanding of audiences.

Design became a form of problem-solving.

And decades later, those different threads converged in an image created for one of the largest cultural and sporting events in the world.

Designing for New York, New Jersey, and the World

Rich Tu’s official FIFA World Cup 2026 poster ultimately tells more than one story.

It is about New York and New Jersey.

It is about football and global culture.

It is about immigration, identity, design, and visual communication.

And it is also about the trajectory of an artist who grew up in New Jersey drawing with his father, reading comic books, studying visual storytelling, and eventually finding himself creating an image designed to represent his home region to the world.

For Tu, the FIFA commission became more than another design project.

It became part of his own creative history—and a contribution to the visual history of the World Cup.