At 23, Sydney Rheeder Made the Loeries Top 10, Twice

When Sydney Rheeder was still an intern at TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris, design director Sacha Traest asked if she could skip her final year of university to join the agency full-time. She didn’t, but it was nice to have an offer letter in hand a full 10 months before graduating.

At just 23, after joining the agency in Johannesburg, her work on City Lodge Hotels’ ‘Bedtime Stories for Business People’ placed her in the Loeries top 10 for both designers and information architects across the Middle East and Africa.

Above: City Lodge Hotels 'Bedtime Stories for Business People'

Earlier this year, she secured her first promotion and leapt from junior designer to creative innovation lead – a new role that she herself pitched to the agency.

‘Young achiever’ might just be an understatement, and by the sounds of things, she’s always been that way.

Creative passions began bubbling at a young age for the self-described “pretty restless” kid, always on the lookout for something new to learn or beautiful to create. Free time was spent playing every sport on offer, crafting, shooting home videos, and writing poems, scripts, even a novel. University presented the opportunity to channel that energy: film, fashion, and architecture were all up for consideration, but Sydney ended up selecting a BA in information design.

“It completely surprised me,” says Sydney. “I went in not quite knowing what to expect, but those four years became some of the most formative of my life.” The breadth of the course allowed Sydney to explore everything from colour theory and brand design to film and ideation in all its forms. “More than anything, it introduced me to human-centred design. This rewired how I see the world. It trained my brain to notice patterns, systems, and stories embedded in everything around me.”

Still never one to rest, Sydney spent the break between semesters at TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris, where what was supposed to be a two-week shadowing gig turned into a two-month internship. That’s when she got to work on her first professional project: a full rebrand for the pan-African digital connectivity company, Bayobab. Out of the entire rollout, it was the logo design element that really stuck with her, as it taught her how much craft and patience go into something as stripped down as an icon.

“There were four of us working on it, and together we must have created over 300 versions. No exaggeration. We printed and pinned every single one to the walls of the boardroom, covering every inch of space. By logo 299, we were all exhausted and a bit delirious,” Sydney recalls.

“Then one morning, our design director, Sacha, walked in holding his takeaway coffee and a napkin. He said, ‘I think I’ve got something,’ and stuck the napkin to the wall. The idea had come to him while having his morning coffee. We looked at it and we knew. It just felt right.”

By the end of the internship, she’d been offered a job and was looking forward to a career in creativity; but it wasn’t always smooth sailing. Entering the world of advertising after graduation, day-to-day work didn’t quite bring the same spark. Turns out, it wasn’t just designing that had kept her inspired throughout her degree – it was the learning that fed her curious spirit. So she shifted her mindset, focusing on the opportunity to learn and develop as much as possible in this first phase of her career, asking questions, absorbing information, and staying open.

Above: On stage at the Loeries

That perspective has motivated Sydney to invest in her growth year on year. She’s now got a diploma in creative strategy from Miami Ad School, a diploma from Red & Yellow, a mini MBA in AI from Section, and she tops it all up with online classes from MasterClass.

“I’m still early in my career,” she explains, “so I try to explore as many corners of the industry as I can. Your output is only as good as your input, and feeding that curiosity has become second nature.” She also soaks up wisdom as a mentee at Open Chair, a South African NGO and non-profit community founded by Suhana Gordhan to champion women in advertising through access, visibility, and impact.

All that exploration has opened Sydney’s eyes to what she really loves in this industry: the big-picture thinking behind the work. She reports feeling most aligned when solving problems and driving useful impact in the long term. It’s a side to her that naturally leans to the future and wants to shape it; in the age of AI, it’s no surprise that she’s relishing “being part of the early chaos when everything feels possible.”

Emerging technologies have fascinated Sydney since university, when she used to stay up late listening to podcasts about innovation. So when she came across TBWA’s innovation practice, NEXT, where creativity, strategy, and future-thinking collide, “it instantly lit a spark.”

She heard her calling and chased it, carving out the position she now holds as creative innovation lead. To Sydney, this means figuring out how to embed a culture of experimentation and future-readiness into the agency’s creative process.

“The role lets me work across departments, shaping long-term thinking, collaborating with teams across all departments, and contributing to the agency’s bigger picture. It’s made me more excited than ever to be at Hunt Lascaris and to help build what comes next.”

Above: TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris winning Best Digital Agency at the Bookmark Awards 2024

The potential of AI falls within her remit, for which she has a clear, nuanced vision. She warns that “outsourcing our imagination,” especially in light of studies that suggest it makes us lazier, will kill the spark, and that treating AI like “a magic wand instead of a collaborator” is equally fatal – she hates when people “skip the critical step of questioning its outputs or fail to coach it with the right context and examples.” AI won’t fix a bad idea, she adds, and “as the internet floods with AI slop, quality matters more than ever.”

The best way to combat this kind of approach is to get ahead of it, she argues. “Over the next year, the goal is to lead the shift, not react to it,” says Sydney, sharing that the real craft lies in the way humans can guide prompts, curate results, and blend AI into workflows. Those human skills, she predicts, will become the new edge: “As AI democratises ‘expert’ tasks, our value shifts to creative judgment, empathy, curiosity, and taste, those uniquely human abilities that no algorithm can replicate.” In her view, “AI will one day do what electricity did for the industry,” so in order to future-proof craft and careers, we must invest in upskilling and encourage experimentation.

“We need to double down on what made agencies like Hunt Lascaris great: philosophy, craft, values,” Sydney emphasises. “Creativity can be fast, but it shouldn’t be hollow. If we let it, AI can give us back time to do the most human parts of our work.”