Since my middle school years, I’ve been enjoying visiting different fairs and events such as this “Seoul Illustration Fair”. This was a personal event that I myself enjoy going to every year, which led me to choosing this event for the event branding project.
Overview
The Seoul Illustration Fair started in 2015, with the intention of introducing illustrators to the world, providing them a junction between companies and clients, and also with the public. The Seoul Illustration Fair consists of several booths for each individual artist where they can showcase and sell their art. Most events are held for around three days and are held in one of the COEX halls located in Seoul, Gangnam-gu Samsung-dong.
The main objective of the event is to provide a place for artists to inter-act and show off their work with companies, clients, and the public. Their long-term intention for the start of this event is to also introduce new mediums and content, further developing the graphic design and illustration field.
Their target audience is geared toward young demographics interested in illustrations and companies and clients looking for artists to recruit and to work with. For most recent events held from 2020 to 2022, the target audience was focused on generation z, trying to appeal to the public.
My Process:
I wanted to keep the graphic elements of their event but focus on a more recent trend in the illustration field. This was my initial mood board, collected from different samples.
I was mostly inspired by the graphic design more prominent in the Korean area as this event is based in Seoul, Korea. Organic and fluid shapes were also what I thought would fit with the event’s identity, leaving a creative and artistic taste. In terms of how the brand should be represented, there were some keywords that I personally thought would best represent the event.
There were also some cliches to avoid while expressing these keywords. The Seoul Illustration Fair mainly consists of sales and purchases of goods created by artists. However, the promotion should not be focused on the sale of products, rather the exposure the artists get, the interaction between artists and companies, clients, and the public should be the main selling point.
It felt fit for this event to consist of more expressive lines to represent the artistic aspect of the event. I wanted to create a very graphic style since this is an illustration fair, with close ties with art, so I wanted it to be a bit more expressive and less minimalistic. For most copies, I tried to stir away from capital letters so the event doesn’t have an authoritative feeling as this event wants to invite as many people as possible, and welcome them to this safe ground.
As for the secondary type, since the primary type is more expressive, and other graphic elements are used for the deliverables and wireframe, I didn’t want every element to be fighting each other, so I kept it simple and more readable for the audience.
With the color palette of this project, and the little flower-like element that I also used for the logo. Since this is not a graphic design event, this should work as an indication for the audience to notice its illustration roots, seeming more organic and playful.
My logo mainly has 3 systems or stages. The first one is the most lengthy, and the third, is the simplest.
The first logo: I wanted to also anticipate Korean into the title as this event is based in Seoul. And I figured I would add Korean to the largest logo since I would have to combine Korean AND English together.
Second logo: This is a more graphic logo, a logo that I mainly used for my wire frame and most deliverables. The little flower-like element is something I took from the examples from last year’s branding, where they had a similar kind of flower peaking through the logo.
The last one: I wanted to play around with the weight of each of the characters and figured this placement was the kind of balance I wanted for the event, and this basically says, Seoul illustration fair, SIF
Wireframes
These are a few other elements that I used, different placement of the SIF logo with the flowers, the flowers snowing on the wireframe, and going outside of the yellow canvas so the event doesn’t seem too restricted and is more creative and inviting to the audience. And since the 2025 event is a winter event, I wanted to add a little bit of a winter aspect, but not too much, since this is not mainly focused on that.
I also wanted to create a booth section where the audience is able to look at participating artists in one setting as I noticed that there was no existing section where I could search for existing artists. I wanted to interpret my own experiences from the past events and to correct some aspects that I personally thought was a hastle.
Applications
The past examples from the Seoul illustration fair, they use a lot of abstract lines that go with small illustrations that the participants of the event created, and what I did with my deliverables also was to go along with the idea of these lines and to give a graphic and unified feeling to the audience. I wanted it to seem creative and playful.
Other graphic elements I put in are these little illustrations. I tried to create my version of the stickers from the Seoul Illustration Fair, with the color palette of this project, and the little flower-like element that I also used for the logo.
This was such an interesting and exciting project for me as it was related to a personal experience of mine, but in a new way- this was my first branding experience!
Figma URL: https://www.figma.com/file/Uthv9VrRd23Qi7DO0wC84Q/Untitled?node-id=0%3A1&t=jQuO6SFZaMu7HpwR-1
https://www.figma.com/file/yTMxO7g4Wsh1j5LZNlprcb/Untitled?t=fwdI4cMUXq7R7bDB-1