Facing East
Rising Sun Media is an independent design studio creating thoughtful Squarespace websites and visual communications for people doing meaningful work.
Behind it is me, designer, writer and curator Yolande Hyde and the creative practice, storytelling and small business experience that comes along with me. The work begins with understanding what you're building, who it's for and what it needs to do, then finding the clearest and most beautiful way to bring that into form.
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My design journey began in the late 1990s, creating posters, flyers, yoga timetables and promotional campaigns for my own yoga studio. With simple software and a fairly instinctive sense of design, I created the visual and written material for hundreds of events, teacher training programs and visiting presenters.
Writing was always part of the work. So was finding the image, colour, type and language that could capture the particular feeling of something and communicate it to the right people.
Around 2005, I co-created my first website with a local developer and discovered that everything I loved about print could move into a much larger, living form. Words, images, colour, structure and movement could work together to tell a story. I was hooked.
In 2020, while closing the bricks-and-mortar home of my yoga studio, I built my first website entirely on my own. Rising Sun Media grew from there.
Today, I work exclusively in Squarespace, designing and restoring websites for small businesses, creatives, community organisations and purpose-led enterprises across Australia. The work has expanded to include copywriting, visual identities, print and digital media, ecommerce and the many small pieces that allow a business to communicate as one coherent whole.
Storytelling remains at the centre of it. I've been writing a monthly newsletter for more than twenty years, have published a book on the spiritual journey of motherhood, and continue to write across nature, yoga and seasonal philosophy. That long relationship with words has become an integral part of how I approach websites: not as containers for content, but as places where story, structure and design meet.
I remain fascinated by what makes one business feel entirely unlike another. Rather than bringing a house style to every project, I look for the character already present in the work and build from there.
That's probably the least accidental part of it.
