RESEARCH_JILEE

Ji Lee is a Communication Designer at Facebook, and former designer and creative director at the Google Creative Lab. He is known for his illustrations and public-art projects. He also teaches at the School of Visual Arts. Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea. He moved to Brazil when he was 10, and later moved to New York City to study at Parsons School of Design. He ended up graduating with a degree in communication and graphic design

The homepage of Lee’s website has a category for his own personal projects. Interestingly this is placed before his professional projects in the hierarchy, as if these mean more to him than his professional work. Lee has had some extremely high profile personal projects which have been pivotal in his career as a creative. 

Lee’s self-set projects are like visual anecdotes. They have a certain cheek to them that make them amusing, and engaging with an audience. 

The wordless web is a self-set project of Lee’s who collaborated with a web developer to develop a web extension that would take all of the text of the internet. The result is almost poetic. Lee’s work covers a wide range of subjects and mediums. From web apps, to product design, to collections of images. 

The project the World Trade Centre Logo Preservation Society is a collection of images where the subject is logos and signs that have a New York Sky line with the World Trade Centres included. Not only does Lee make products, and apps, but he documents things and brings things to the attention, almost like an artist would. However, Lee’s collections and artistic intentions are delivered in a modest and welcoming way which really sets it apart from the more serious nature of fine art. 

White Feed gives you a daily Facebook post that is just a simple white image. Nothing else. So you can have a little piece of nothingness in between posts in your busy Facebook News Feed.

This project started nearly twenty years ago as an assignment in my typography class at art school. Students were encouraged to see letters beyond their dull, practical functionality.

The challenge is to visualize the meaning of a word, using only the graphic elements of the letters forming the word, without adding any outside parts. The challenge was very hard, but the reward of “cracking” a word felt great. So this became a lifelong project for me.

In 2011, Lee published a book called “Word as Image” containing nearly 100 words, this shows how Lee has monetised from his self-set projects. This entrepreneurial tendency shows how self-set projects can play a larger role in a designers personal practice, than just ‘trying out new techniques’ or ‘promoting yourself’.

RESEARCH_JILEE

2011/03 Ji Lee from CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

JI LEE - MAIN STAGE PRESENTATION - OFFSET2013 from OFFSET on Vimeo.

Lee talks extensively and exclusively about his self-set projects and highlights how they directly impact his professional work. Lee has been very successful in his career, but plans to make personal projects a full time job.

The Bubble Project

'Streets of New York City is filled with ugly and intrusive ads everywhere you look: walls, bus stops, telephone booths, billboards, subway trains, sides of buses, and so on and on. They are visual pollution that negatively affects the quality of lives of New Yorkers. Yet, there are no regulations from the city to control the rampant proliferation of these ads.

I wanted to do something about this problem, so I decided to print 50,000 stickers in the shape of speech-bubble. I have been placing them on top of ads on the streets. They are left blank, inviting passersby to fill them in with their expressions. I photograph and archive the results. The bubble stickers instantly transform the intrusive and dull corporate monologues into a public dialogue.

Since its launch in 2002, the Bubble Project has become a global project. Bubblers all around the world are bubbling their own towns.’

The Bubble Project, as proclaimed by its Lee, aims to counteract corporate marketing and advertisement messages in public spaces.

He posts these blank speech bubbles on top of advertisements throughout New York City allowing anyone who sees them to write in their comments and thoughts. By filling in the bubbles people engage in the project and transform “the corporate monologue into an open dialogue”. After time passes, the comments are photographed and posted on the project’s website.

The Bubble Project has quickly gained popularity and independent efforts have sprung up in other parts of the world in countries such as Italy or Argentina.

On June 1, 2006, a book written by Lee himself was released. It explains the whole idea behind the project and shows the best pictures taken in the first 4 years, showing the results of the project.

RESEARCH_AFTERHOURSLECTURE

Jerwood Encounters: After Hours
An exhibition of personal work by graphic designers
Curated by Nick Eagleton
JVA at Jerwood Space, London
15 May - 23 June 2013

Curated by Nick Eagleton, UK Creative Director of design agency The Partners, the upcoming exhibition, After Hours, at JVA at Jerwood Space, London is the first Jerwood Encounters exhibition devoted to graphic design, and opens a window into the creative minds of graphic designers through the personal work they create.

With projects and ideas across the spectrum of media and themes, this rich variety of works explores the personal questions and passions that inspire designers to make them.

The show brings together a collection of outstanding personal works. Most of them have never been shown and were never intended, when created, for public view. They are the result of the compulsive creative practice common to this group of exceptional graphic designers. The work offers a glimpse into the imagination of the contributors; creating an original, brave and thoughtful exhibition of their artwork which is sure to inspire the next generation of graphic designers. 

Nick Eagleton is UK Creative Director of design agency The Partners and is known for numerous prestigious projects including the relaunch of the Ford blue oval. He is a frequent judge at creative industry awards, and is accustomed to winning awards for his clients, including the Jerwood Charitable Foundation. Eagleton has embraced the ethos of the show and curated the exhibition outside of his usual work hours.

‘I wanted to find a fresh way to showcase the creative imagination that I see and am amazed by in my profession every day, and to bring together a wonderfully eclectic and surprising show. An exhibition that looks only at the personal work of graphic designers. The things they do when they're free from the constraints of a brief, a client or a fee. What better way to get an insight into the way their creative minds work? I hope the exhibition will throw light on this, and bring a little delight and intrigue along the way.’ Nick Eagleton

Contributors include: Robert Ball, Anthony Burrill, Phil Carter, Daniel Eatock, Michael Johnson, Kingston University, Alan Kitching, Magpie Studio, Craig Oldham, Jack Renwick, Steve Royle, Jim Sutherland, Young Creatives Network, and writer-in-residence, Nick Asbury.

Jerwood Encounters: After Hours. Monday 10 June 2013 - A series of Pecha Kucha talks from Jerwood Charitable Foundation on Vimeo.

The After Hours exhibition also featured a series of Pecha Kucha presentations. Craig Oldham’s presentation was not of his work, but of personal work and Authorship in graphic design. Oldham highlights the difficulty in pinning down the idea of authorship. Oldham highlights that he is known for best for his own self-set work but he does not feel it can be called graphic design. He asserts that graphic design is not a medium for self expression. Oldham highlights that the graphic design should be invisible in the client relationship, if the there is no client, then there is no graphic design.

Oldham says that self-set projects are good, but they need to have a purpose and there needs to be a context, and relevance to the work.

At this stage I am in no place to agree or disagree with this, I need to conduct further investigation into this subject.

RESEARCH_JOHN'OREILLY

‘As we enter the 21st century it has never been more clear that the definition of what designers do and who they are has never been more ambiguous.’ p8

‘…the designer has never been more crucial to commerce and business. In the last 20 years the designer has been promoted up the order from being the tea-boy of business, fetching a brief and running with it, to being on the front line.’ p8

‘And then of course there’s the training and educational background of designers which sees them entering schools of ‘art and design’. This relationship with art is something that simmers away at the back of the minds of most designers.’ p8

‘Their sense of themselves is bound up with the idea of being ‘creative’, yet this existential imperative comes face to face, on a daily basis, with the demands of the client.’ p8

‘It is precisely because it is a discipline where art and commerce face-off against each other that it becomes a graphic benchmark of where society is.’ p8

Talking about Brian Eno’s philosophy:

‘Most designers have some private negotiation with themselves about the contract they make between art and money. On the surface, they simply find a spot nearer one end or another on the ‘Job-axis’ between cash and culture. Some take dull big-paying jobs to fund the hours on more rewarding cash-poor jobs, or take the money to spend on their own work. The latter, design writer Rick Poyner calls a ‘Robin Hood’ tactic.’ p8

‘…about designers reflecting on what they do and on how they imagine themselves. It’s about how the conflict of commerce and creativity is played out. An ultimately it’s about the existential brief they set themselves.’ p9

‘Design has always been regarded as art’s cousin from the wrong side of the tracks. Tainted by commerce, it has to earn its way in the world in the way that aristocratic art doesn’t. The tradition of art is a cultural inheritance from which any artist can draw.’ p128

‘In any case, in very practical ways this crude distinction between art and design is increasingly untenable. Many contemporary artists actually rely on designers’ work as a crucial feature for their artworks.’ p128

‘Jeff Koons used to farm out work to craftsmen and recently Damien Hirst has relied heavily on input from Jonathan Barnbrook. Barnbrook described his role for Hirst’s pharmaceutical series The Last Supper as being that of an art director.’ p128

‘Often artists and designers play out the same topic.’ p128

‘Experimental Jetset, Peter Davenport and Tony Linkson have all created work relating to the nature of time.’ p128