Ordinary People, extraordinary work. We chat to the Seoul-based studio

Ordinary People is a design studio based in South Korea, but if you think their name implies that they create similarly run-of-the-mill, humdrum work, you’re very much mistaken. On the contrary, their portfolio is so stuffed with first-rate creative projects, from exhibition design for Seoul’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art to some utterly irresistible poster design, that we scarcely knew where to start. So we had a chat with Jin Kang of the collective to find out its story.

“All of us were at the same university, doing the same major,” Jin Kang explains. “In 2006, as graphic design students, we gathered and started a project called We Make Posters, and in the process we naturally became a graphic design studio.”

It turns out that the collective is named after the John Legend song. Jin says: “It was in 2005, when we gathered to name ourselves we tried to come up with a name which had meaning, so the arguing never ended! However, in that time this song Ordinary People just played, and all of our members liked it. So we decided to use this song’s name as our name. Thanks, John!”

They might have started out with posters, but these days they’re working on grander projects. “We are doing self-initiated projects such as TedXHongik,” Jin explains, “and also various commercial projects with National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, Magazine CA, and many others. Currently we are doing a collaboration project with a bag company, two books for art museums, an exhibition with a writer, and a brand identity project for a robot machine company. As you can see from our website, we don’t care about digital or analogue, commercial or experimental, small or big. What we care about is how we can make any project perfect.”

Working from a small studio in Seoul, the atmosphere at the Ordinary People’s place is dynamic, to say the least. “It’s not clean and calm. It’s more chaotic and disorganised. Finding a ruler is the hardest thing in our studio, hahaha.” Neither is the dynamic between team members calm and collected. “We’ve spent 11 years as friends, teammates and rivals,” Jin continues, so “no member is just a co-worker. Sometimes, we fight together for a better result, sometimes we fight each other for a better result.”

Regarding the creative scene in Seoul, Jin says that things are just starting to get interesting – “we can see more opportunity and respect for small studios” – but they have no time for Korean designers who copy Western styles. “We feel so sorry when we find pathetic works which just copy styles and concepts from famous Western designers, then just change the lettering to Korean. What is the difference between Google Translator and that work?”