Rough Drafts - The Thinking Process (How Ideas Evolve)
Sometimes I throw in ideas, sometimes I throw them out. Nothing comes out perfect, I upgrade them to perfection over time. Here are some of the scribbles and doodles I did that displays my thinking process.
FC Gwang Logo
FC Gwang, the Korean soccer team I play for. We were getting new uniforms and someone mentioned that it'd be cool to add the logo on the uniforms. After some initial suggestions, we settled on a "shield" shape as the logo base and the first logo was born. After about a year in use, I thought of integrating the Korean character "광" (pronounced Gwang) into the soccer ball to emphasize our identity as a Korean soccer team. After a bit more work, the current logo was born.
Gah Rahk Mah Dahng
Gah Rahk Mah Dahng is a Korean Traditional Percussion RSO (Registered Student Organization) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Many of my friends are in this group and I got a chance to help them design a group hoodie. I tried to encorporate the Korean characters into the design to emphasize the group's identity as a Korean percussions group.
Stop Racism Video
This was how the Stop Racism video came about. What started out as a simple scribble turned itself into a project and soon I was studying the characters of all the languages I could think of. I had a very fun time trying to make faces out of words - it was the first time I got to write faces instead of drawing them.
KIFA Logo
I was trying to come up with a logo for the Korean soccer community of UIUC. I wanted it to be simple, but at the same time I wanted to make sure there were elements in the logo that made it unique to our university. Since any official logo or mascot of UIUC were copyrighted and couldn't be used, I was thinking of using the skyline of Champaign-Urbana or the school. Unfortunately, our school doesn't have a unique, instantly recognizable skyline and neither do Champaign and Urbana (the land and buildings are very....low and flat). In the end, I decided to use silhouettes of recognizable icons of the university.
KIFA AllStars Logo
The people in KIFA wanted to create a logo to put on a team tracktop that would be handed out to the "All-Star" team that went to a soccer tournament in Indiana to compete with teams from other schools. After trying out a variety of star inspired designs, I decided to make the star shape take a more subtle shape because it seemed like the concept of using a star to depict all the "stars" on the team was a bit overused. The result was a subtle pentagonal star designed in gold with silver letterings.
JMK Logo
As I was creating this very website, I felt the need for a good logo to express myself. Something that would leave a strong impression and would be a good representation of myself. My English name is John Matthew Kim and I've been using the initials JMK as an alias for a while. I decided to create a wordmark with those initials. I’ve always like wordmarks and logos that cleverly incorporated something meaningful in them. I was fascinated by optical illusions and also thought it was a good way to express the idea that I can think flexibly (depending on where to focus on, parts of the entire image can change meaning or form). After playing around with some ideas, I settled on my current logo for myself.