Jaemin Lee’s gloriously retro exhibition identities and poster designs

Jaemin Lee is a South Korean designer, art director and founder of agency Studio Fnt, whose confident appropriation of retro motifs simultaneously recalls a bygone era of design, and through his novel compositions, allows him to produce striking, modern work.

Jaemin makes ready use of iconic visual elements he recalls being fascinated with as a child in the 1980s, including “gradation, 3D and neon logos, surreal images, retro-futurism, the very first computer graphic and its rough polygons”, he says.

His repeated work for Seoul Record Fair has resulted in a very distinct and recognisable identity. The posters, printed matter and merchandise form a series year-by-year, each time employing the same geometric record design in new, eye-catching compositions.

Jaemin attracts a lot of briefs designing identities and posters for film festivals, music fairs and exhibitions, requiring him to succinctly extrapolate the overall themes present in the works being showcased. Point-Line-Plane-TV for example contains a dot matrix in muted hues of purple and pink which seem to oscillate, differing in size and organised overlapping on white space.

Type and geometry feature heavily. For New Shelters and Refuge Form he created four posters utilising elongated, skewed light-weight type which collide on a background of vibrant block colour. “Text, or typography, can be altered to be as clear, or as unclear as you wish…I am interested in the vagueness and impreciseness between text and image,” he explains.