I grew up in the Philippines, took my first job abroad in Brunei, spent most of my career in Dubai, and spent two years designing for a UK company while living in Portugal. That path taught me something no design education covered: visual language is not universal, and behaving as though it is, is a form of arrogance.
The myth of the universal icon
We are taught that icons transcend language. Some do. Most are conventions that happen to be widely distributed, which is a different claim.
A gesture that is friendly in one country is obscene a short flight away. Colours carry different associations for mourning, celebration and luck depending on where the person looking at them grew up. An owl reads as wisdom in one culture and as a bad omen in another.
None of this means design cannot cross borders. It means the crossing has to be checked rather than assumed, and the check is cheap compared with the alternative.
Bilingual layout is not translation
Arabic is not English flipped. Setting a bilingual layout properly means resolving different line lengths for the same content, different apparent weights at the same optical size, two numeral systems, and a lockup that has to feel balanced rather than like one language borrowing space from the other.
Right-to-left is a layout decision made at the start, not a property applied at the end. I have seen well-made English designs mirrored into Arabic and come out looking like a translation of a design instead of a design.
The tell is always the details — where the emphasis falls, how a heading breaks, whether the Arabic looks set or merely placed.
Designing for a crowd that is not one crowd
In a single hour, a directory screen in a Dubai mall serves Emirati families, South Asian workers, European tourists and East Asian visitors. There is no majority user to design for and no shared set of assumptions to lean on.
That sounds like a constraint and is actually a discipline. It forces you to design for the person who does not share your reference points, which tends to produce clearer work for everybody, including the people who do.
Prayer times as a design requirement
On the mall wayfinding work we built prayer times and directions to the nearest prayer room into the product as a primary feature, with its own panel rather than a line buried in a menu.
If you did not grow up in this region, that requirement would very likely never occur to you. Not through carelessness — it simply is not in the mental model you brought with you.
That is the whole argument in one example. Cultural competence is not intuition or good intentions. It is a research practice: you ask the people who live there, and you take the answer seriously enough to give it real estate.
What moving around actually did
It made me hold my instincts more loosely. I still have strong instincts and I still use them, but I have been wrong often enough, in ways that were obvious to a local and invisible to me, that I now treat the first idea as a hypothesis.
It also made me faster at spotting when a brief has an unexamined assumption inside it — usually a sentence beginning ‘people always’ or ‘everyone knows’.
The arrogance
The specific arrogance I am describing is not malice. It is assuming that the way you read a page is the way pages are read. That your defaults are neutral. That the absence of a complaint from people who look like you means the work is clear.
It is an easy assumption to hold and an expensive one to hold, because you cannot see it from inside. The only reliable correction I have found is to ask somebody who is not you, before the work ships rather than after.
Eighteen years and four countries later, that is the durable lesson. Not a style, not a toolkit — a habit of assuming my perspective is one of several, and checking which one the work is actually for.