ORDINARY PEOPLE

SEOUL-BASED GRAPHIC DESIGN STUDIO ORDINARY PEOPLE AIMS FOR “BETTER, EFFICIENT AND EXACT COMMUNICATION” ACHIEVED THROUGH VARIOUS AND ACTIVE EXPERIMENTS .

Could you please introduce Ordinary People, who you are and what you do?

ORDINARY PEOPLE is a graphic design studio based in Seoul.  Our motto is “WE THE ORDINARY PEOPLE AIM FOR BETTER, EFFICIENT AND EXACT COMMUNICATION BY DOING VARIOUS AND ACTIVE EXPERIMENTS.”  Our members are all from the same university and major and, as graphic design students back in 2006, we decided to build a team and start the project “we make posters.” In the process of doing this project, we became a graphic design studio naturally.  Since then we have created self-initiated projects such as The Bremen, Everyday Graphic Calendar and Life is Unwritten, as well as done various commercial projects with entities such as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Korea, Magazine CA, and many others.

 

You work in several mediums ranging from event and exhibition design to editorial and publishing, visual identity and posters design – is there any specific characteristic of Ordinary People that you find carries through amongst all the various elements of your practice?

We don’t care about digital or analog, commercial or experimental, small or big. What we care about is how we can make any project to be perfect.

 

How about your recent New Imagination on the Extended Reality project, what was the concept and inspiration behind this work?

New Imagination on the Extended Reality was the title of the Doosan Humanities Theater Series 2016, the concept of which was aimed at depicting ‘Mo-heom’ (which means adventure in Korean) and a sense of movement. For us, “movement” refers to an attitude that refuses to stick within any limitations and provides an attempt to find new ways through which to feel satisfied with what we already know.  Furthermore, a trace refers to something that has moved and we therefore felt it would be a rational and effective visual concept for the event.  From this decision, we created a brush tool comprised of major pieces of event information. The traces left behind after this brush tool was moved across the surface naturally allowed for the traces of information to not remain in a fixed form, but rather change based on different mediums to show various aspects of “movement.” We felt that this could be the perfect way to present the concept of “Mo-heom.”

 

Could you please introduce your recent SM Entertainment Yearbook project? Any characteristic of the company in particular that you aimed to highlight through the editorial design?

The “SM YEARBOOK 2015” is an album artwork archive for SM Entertainment, one of the leading entertainment companies in Korea. The contents of the book consist of creative visual outputs such as album artwork, photography and music videos.  We tried to design a book that could deliver the context of all these creative contents in a diverse format. The book shows its contents by parading images without specific text or data. To realize a degree of completion within the limited pages, we selected images carefully and produced new images for very particular purposes.  These books are displayed in the SM Communication Center for VIPs and visitors only.

 

 

What are you working on currently? What’s next and on deck for Ordinary People?

“Peopolét” is the name we have given to our self-initiated projects and has become a brand for our collection of works based on graphic design and various forms of media.  For this self-project brand, we designed the ‘Everyday Graphic Calendar’ back in 2015, and our ‘Life is Unwritten’ Project in late 2015.  Now we are working on a 3rd project called ‘24hours Seoul.’ These new works will take on the form of an awesome graphic T-shirt.  Furthermore, following support and interest from our fans, we are also getting ready for Everyday Graphic Calendar 2017.  The upgraded version with bring with it new ideas that are all the more interesting. Please stay tuned!

 

ordinarypeople.kr