Seoul Independent Graphic Design (Small-Studio Scene)

• Stay small and work for culture: design the exhibition, the festival, the venue and the humanities book on a small budget, and publish your own books, journals and posters, instead of growing into an advertising agency.
• Let Hangul be the main material: reshape its modular syllable blocks, or break out of them to reinterpret older calligraphic scripts, and enlarge the letters until they become the image.
• Build Hangul and Latin as one system: choose or draw type families that cover both scripts, like Favorit Hangul beside Dinamo's Latin Favorit, and set the two alphabets side by side on the page as equals.
• Keep a small set of repeatable moves: centred alignment, one colour, circles, repetition, letters treated as objects and abstract shapes that only hint at a meaning. Kiljong Arcade drew exactly these shared traits from the 101 works indexed at the Ilmin Museum of Art in 2016.
• Let one concept govern the whole object: apply a single rule to every page or every poster, as Sulki & Min's Cosmos (2017) keeps the printing, paper and binding of a 1981 Korean edition but blurs every page into soft glows.
• Print short runs close to home: risograph with a studio-run print shop, silkscreen posters, and small offset editions sold at the Unlimited Edition art-book fair.

Seoul, South Korea: small studios run by one to a few designers, active from about 2005, such as Sulki & Min (founded 2005, with the imprint Specter Press, 2006–2021), Workroom (2006, with its publishing house Workroom Press) and studio fnt (2006). Designers had grown critical of design as a tool for advertising and corporate branding from the mid-1990s, and the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98 added to it. Some had studied abroad: Sulki & Min met as graduate students at Yale and researched at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, and Jude Kang studied in Switzerland. Finding no role models at home for the practice they wanted, Sulki & Min drew on the Amsterdam studio Mevis & Van Deursen, who taught at Yale and in the Netherlands and whose way of working influenced a generation of designers from those schools, and on their mentor Karel Martens. The scene was surveyed in 'Graphic Design, 2005~2015, Seoul' at the Ilmin Museum of Art (to 29 May 2016, curated by Choi Sung Min and Kim Hyungjin) and in 'Around Seoul*: Independent Graphic Design' (California College of the Arts, February 2020, curated by chris hamamoto), most of whose works went to Letterform Archive

1. Florence Fu, 'This Just In: Contemporary Design of South Korea' (interview with Choi Sung Min on 'Around Seoul*: Independent Graphic Design', CCA, February 2020), Letterform Archive, 14 September 2020, https://letterformarchive.org/news/contemporary-design-of-south-korea/ (mid-1990s turn against design as a tool for advertising and corporate design; the 1997–98 crisis; designers starting small and wanting to keep it that way; Unlimited Edition founded 2009; reshaping Hangul's modular forms or breaking out of them to reinterpret older calligraphic scripts; Favorit Hangul, designed with the Swiss studio Dinamo, and the Hangul and Latin launch posters; Typozimmer as a compilation of Kang's own design experiments, inspired partly by Typografische Monatsblätter while he was a student in Switzerland; captions for Cosmos, Typozimmer, Mad Pride Seoul, An Mano, Everyday Practice and Chris Ro)
2. Han Yun-jeong, '그래픽 디자인, 어디까지 봤니', Kyunghyang Shinmun, 28 March 2016, https://www.khan.co.kr/article/201603282053135 (small studios active from 2005 as alternatives to commercial firms, working for low-budget cultural clients; curators Choi Sung Min and Kim Hyungjin; 101 reference works; Kiljong Arcade's shared traits: centre alignment, monochrome, circles, repetition, letter-like objects and object-like letters, suggestive abstract shapes; show ends 29 May)
3. 'Graphic design in Seoul', Time Out Seoul, 22 March 2016, https://www.timeout.com/seoul/art/graphic-design-in-seoul (the searchable index of works by small-scale studios; Sasa[44]'s One Hundred One Letters; The Book Society's incomplete list of one-off printed matter; Corners and Manual's print shop, headed 'Riso Print shop', though the body text says 'lithography')
4. '그래픽 디자인, 2005~2015, 서울', Cahier de Seoul, https://cahierdeseoul.com/ko/graphic-2005-2015-seoul (2005 as the year small studios became visible; an incomplete archive; work for publishing, art, photography, architecture and theatre as almost their only activity; Corners, founded 2012, which runs a risograph print shop and publishing house, listed with Manual among the participants)
5. 'Insights: Sulki and Min Choi', Walker Art Center, 2 March 2016, https://www.walkerart.org/reader/insights-sulki-and-min-choi-sulki-min-seoul/ (practice in the cultural sector; Roman and Hangul alphabets; Hangul vowels and yin-yang patterns; Specter Press, 2006; 'Clarifying is our business, obscuring is our pleasure')
6. Amy Henry, 'Just the two of us', Pulp 28, Fedrigoni, https://pulp.fedrigoni.com/articles/just-the-two-of-us/ (Sulki & Min met as graduate students at Yale and researched at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht; no role models in South Korea for the practice they wanted; Mevis & Van Deursen taught at Yale and in the Netherlands and influenced a generation from those schools; their mentor Karel Martens; return to Seoul in 2005; Specter Press 2006–2021; Workroom Specter from 2013; the influence of Mevis & Van Deursen and Karel Martens; the Protoform font family; inspired by Young-Jae Cho's 1976 proposal to restructure Hangul for typewriters, a study 'rarely discussed with the depth it deserves'; the origins of unsquared Hangul)
7. Yujin Min, 'studio fnt', Communication Arts, https://www.commarts.com/features/studio-fnt (founded 2006; one or two colours; geometric shapes and patterns; bold Hangul; BiFan's Cell of Fantasy identity, 2016, with a custom typeface for Korean, Chinese and English)
8. Jynann Ong, 'Ore-Oh on how simplicity is key', It's Nice That, 24 January 2020, https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/ore-oh-work-graphic-design-240120 (a Seoul studio founded 2016 for the cultural sector; Hangul as imagery; silkscreen printing)
9. '소장품전: 2010년 이후 한국의 디자인 프로젝트 30', Monthly Design (design.co.kr), 1 July 2020, https://design.co.kr/article/19248 (the Ilmin show; GRAPHIC magazine's small-studio issues; Workroom Press's Propositions series, 2014–; Everyday Practice's Park Geun-hye Gate website, 2017)
10. '원칙 없이도 그럴듯한, 권위를 비트는 디자이너 김형진', Design+ (design.co.kr), 15 October 2017, https://design.co.kr/article/15306 (Kim Hyungjin founded Workroom in 2006 with designer Lee Kyungsoo, editor Park Hwalsung and photographer Park Jeonghoon; Workroom Press started with Workroom in 2006 and set its course as a commercial publisher from 2011)

How Stylogeny researches and checks a style: where the facts come from.