hangul.

designed by Ahn Sang Soo— the gate is designed using all Hangul ‘letters’

Today (10.09.08) is Hangul Day in Korea—a day to celebrate their alphabet. This was brought to my attention by my favorite typography geek-out blog over at Hoefler & Frere-Jones. Jonathan Hoefler gives a pretty good, accurate, and interesting history/description of the language over there, so I won’t go into that here.
What I do want to talk about is this… I spent a couple years in Korea. I’ve been there three different times in three different capacities—missionary, friend, and student. Each visit gave me a different insight into the culture over there and I absolutely love it over there. One thing that did disappoint me to some degree, however, was the lack of really good design present in day-to-day. For quite a while I wasn’t overly smitten with the Hangul alphabet—it doesn’t have the flash of Japanese Hirogana or the “profound symbolism” of Kanji. Hangul is simple, geometric, practical… But, wait, isn’t that like the Swiss ideal? Isn’t that like every designers dream?
My perception of the lack of good design in Korea was not a very accurate reflection of reality. And it becomes less and less true every day. I was recently back in New York at the ADAA Awards show. I spent a couple days with a bunch of really talented, student designers from literally all over the world. Intersting to me, the country with the most represetation wasn’t the USA, it was Korea.
There were a couple Korean designers that really stood out to me, but unfortunately I can only find a link to this one’s site: bykyong.com. Check here work out. There’s some really creative, fun print and web work. She intermixes both Hangul and English in many of her designs—which I think is really reflective of the lifestyle of Korean 20–30-somethings.
I’m a little disappointed I don’t have more to show on a design blog right now, so I’m going to keep my eye out over the next couple days for some good Korean design and post some more. There is a lot of it out there.
Korea kind of feels like the forgotten little sybling of the über hip, ever-present, always on the top of pop and technology culture, Japan, and the growing world power, center of Asian-cinema, origin of Oriental culture, China. So, it’s cool for me to see them get a little attention.

typophilers UNITE!

The opening credits to the 4th annual Typophile Film Festival continue to rake in the awards. Currently it is a finalist for ADAA and an Honorable Mention in the I.D. Student Design Review.

Pictured above (L–R, row x row):
Joshua Kessie, designer; Ashley Mackay, designer; Chris Crosby, designer; Micah Anderson, music composer; Sam Gray, designer; Archie Sessions, writer & designer; Me, art director & designer; Matthew Chrislip, writer; Jeremy Ames, writer & lead designer.

one show…

A couple nights ago Jeremy Ames, Micah Anderson, and I went to the Design One Show at the Chelsea Art Museum to receive a “Silver Pencil” for ours and other’s work on the Typophile Film Festival Opening Credits.
To see all the winner’s work, click here.
To view the piece and to see details about our piece, click here.
I want to thank Punchcut/Typophile, Brent Barson, Eric Gillett, and Linda Sullivan for providing both the opportunity to work on the piece as well as creative direction throughout.
And also thank you’s to everyone else who spent long, long, long and often frustrating hours working on it: Sam Gray, Chris Crosby, Ashley Mackay, Archie Sessions, Joshua Kessie, and Adam Johnson.
And now, I think I am officially sick of talking about this piece. But thanks for listening to everything up to this point.

update… nyc

I’m heading to New York in the morning to attend the One Show this Tuesday. A piece that I worked on last year is up for a pencil—more on that after the event. Last week, the same piece—the opening credits to the Fourth Typophile Film Festival—won a silver cube at the Art Director’s Club. Bardhi, Ashley, and Matthew were there to receive that award. I honestly don’t fully understand exactly what these recognitions mean, but I hear it’s something to be proud of.
For a higher-res version of the video, click here (and wait for download):


Anyways…
In preparation I put together a little portfolio book to show around. I’ll post some more images of it in the near future, but for now just this sheet, pre-cut, of some of the personal work I’ve done with the New Orleans Hornets brand:


There’s a million other things I could post, but I’ll keep it brief and leave some stuff to talk about during the week. For now, I’ll just leave you with this cool shot from my last stay in the Big Apple.