LOVE IS KOREA

STOCKHOLM-BASED SNASK ATTEMPTS TO REBRAND NOT JUST AN ORDINARY ITEM OR EVEN AN ORDINARY ORGANIZATION, BUT THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL COMMUNIST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD…

A sarcastic but wittily sharp sense of humor is one of the charms of Snask, a Stockholm-based brand agency that never ceases to come up with one cool project after another. The latest one involves the North Korean leader’s lookalike waving a heart-shaped flag while chanting, “Love Korea! Glorious Korea!” and perfectly encapsulates Snask’s quintessential way of kicking ass. Love Is Korea is the name of this dramatic project whose so-called aim of turning the country (the full name is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) into the ‘Love Korea’ land is a part of the Rethink section of ICON magazine that invites designers to rethink and rebrand anything they want. What’s dramatic about the project is Snask’s decision to rebrand not just an ordinary item like a cigarette pack or an ordinary organization but the most controversial communist country in the world. For this rebranding, Snask sticks to the red-blue color scheme taken from North Korea’s national flag, not only because it’s a beautiful contradiction but because the two colors are the same key colors of South Korea’s national flag. With the heart being added as an additional element of the design and the word ‘사랑’ or ‘love,’ the graphic identity includes everything from heart-shaped buttons and postcards to business cards and bank notes. Snask’s special project also comes with one condition – “Prove to the world that you are a free democracy, and we will help you to implement this identity for free”- while proposing the changing of the name of the country from North Korea to ‘Love Korea.’ (Which would be pretty cool because as Snask suggests, it would be “the first country in the world to have ‘love’ as your number one value as well as the name of your country.”) As sarcastic as the project may seem, Snask did say that “Some people think we actually made this rebrand in the belief that it would change North Korea, but we wanted to see if we could show change through design and branding.” The funny thing is, the Swedish design agency recently received an email form the North Korean government asking them to take down the site immediately with the threat of launching cyber attacks!