Designing for all aspects of Korean culture: the multi-talented Everyday Practice

Korean studio Everyday Practice is constantly challenging its own design methodologies. Not only working in two-dimensional print, the studio, founded by Kwon Joonho, Kim Kyung-chul and Kim Eojin also expands its creative practice across a multitude of digital and experiential platforms. Founding designer Kwon Joonho speaks to It’s Nice That about its breadth of recent projects. From a book of essays documenting the Korean refugee crisis to an interactive poster generator that questions the existence of design in the age of AI, Everyday Practice continues to produce attentive and intriguing design.

In one project HereThere, designed by Kim Eojin to create the identity for a modern dance performance inspired by the traditional Korean dance form of Ganggangsulae. Historically, the dance was performed to bring about a bountiful harvest but has since become a significant symbol of Korean culture. The identity takes on the cyclical form of the dance while also encompassing its community values by interconnecting letterforms which see serifs, sans serifs and Hangul (the Korean alphabet) joined together to resemble a cumulative loop.

Alternatively, the studio designed a book of essays titled Hello Korea, intended for Korean refugees and published by the Refugee Human Rights Centre in Korea. The book is a collaboration with Riwon Kim and comprises of 15 different accounts of refugees living in Korea where their stories are recognised as “the most outspoken voices of refugees in Korean society today”. Joonho says, “We tried to convey their voices in the most straightforward manner”, and as a result, the book’s most decorative feature is the cover – and even that is stripped down to the bare elements, featuring only two typographic hierarchies and the colour pink.

For the past six months, Everyday Practice has been producing the graphic design for the mammoth event, 111011101 Content Impact 2018 Showcase. The event showcases an eclectic range of industries including data scientists, indie artists, autonomous cars and other forms of entertainment, which are skilfully compacted into the event’s identity by the designers. “We have tried to express the theme of the project through a combination of colourful and graphic objects that represent the various fields”, explains Joonho. On closer inspection, the busy visual identity indeed does reference the mechanical cogs of automobiles and alludes to a data-inspired aesthetic. With motion graphics by Particle Field, the design is an example of an identity that works on various scales, small and large while also transferring smoothly between moving image and static print. It’s an identity which represents Everyday Practice as a whole: multi-skilled and adaptable in its own creative output for the client’s requirements.