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.

bizarre…

i love this!
from www.quinta-feira.org.

spécimen général

This is a French type specimen book filled with beautifully amazing type and ornamental borders. I borrowed it from my friend Sam, who borrowed it from the BYU Library. To give someone the benefit of the doubt, someone then in turned borrowed it from me. The problem is that I’m not sure who that someone is or when (or if) someone intends to return it. I imagine sharing a few samples here would only make others want to “borrow” it more than ever before. But… if you borrowed it—or know who borrowed it—if you would unborrow it, me and Sam and the Harold B Lee Library would really appreciate it. Thanks.
Otherwise, just enjoy the samples that I scanned from the book before it’s disappearance.

HTF Didot Letterforms…

I was working on a wordmark for a client today using the HTF Didot type family and I got sidetracked because I was so incredibly mesmerized by its letterforms. I started turning them on end, backwards, and upside down to take them out of the expected so that my eyes could better appreciate the shapes and the lines. Take the lightest set of letters, for example: at first glance, it almost looks Arabic or Thai or something. Really crazy. Crazy beautiful.

NEWWORK magazine

I love the posi/nega-tive interplay in these grabs from NEWWORK magazine.

circles, squares, triangles…

This piece from Wyeth Hansen reminds me a bit of this piece I did one day playing around with letter shapes and lines. Hansen’s piece has great play of shape and color.

1828 Roman

This is an awesomely quirky face by Darius Wells form 1828. Wow.