Tell us about your time working for GQ Korea and your vision for the magazine.

I make a commercial magazine and therefore have two visions for it, one public and one private. First, I have a vision determined by economics and the necessity of generating enough advertising revenue to keep the magazine circulating and sales increasing. But then I also want to create a magazine that is personally satisfying. Sometimes I find an appropriate compromise and am satisfied with the results, but I always have the desire to create a magazine that is absolutely satisfying—unifying all the content of the magazine together, including its advertisements.

You're a long time user of our fonts. Do you remember when we started talking together and what typeface of ours you first used?

We started talking five years ago. Two years had passed since I began working at GQ Korea, and I had a thirst for new ideas. There was a new team, and it was time to try new things and make a different kind of magazine. Ahead of GQ Korea’s 16th anniversary redesign, I found Dinamo's Prophet and I bought it without hesitation. Prophet was a distinctly different typeface.

GQ Korea's 20th anniversary issue just arrived in our letterbox. It has such character, with all the different inserts, and it's exciting to see our upcoming ABC Camera explored throughout the pages so extensively. Why did you choose Camera for this issue?

I'm very, very grateful to Dinamo for giving me the opportunity to use Camera! We made the 20th anniversary cover in collaboration with Louis Vuitton. However due to Covid-19, shooting abroad wasn't possible, and so a different kind of cover was needed.

Our 20th anniversary trilogy of covers featured paintings by three artists, rather than our existing tradition of featuring models or celebrities on the front. I thought that the light trap holes of Camera would match nicely with this art project. It came together into something that many people have enjoyed. Among the spreads, there are also pages designed with the motif of a circle that emerged from Camera's own holes.

It's been crazy for us to see how Camera has spread so much with the sticker sheets you included in the issue. How did that idea actually come about?

I decided that it was not appropriate to put a cover line on three covers featuring drawings by artists, so I came up with the idea that the readers themselves could decorate the cover with headlines if they wanted to using alphabetical stickers. The editor-in-chief happily accepted this proposal. We noticed people around us started putting stickers on their smartphones or laptops when the issue was released. Your tooth sticker has also been very popular!

That’s amazing to hear! You’ve also been using Maxi for some of your fashion spreads. What have you enjoyed about Maxi in these fashion contexts?

From the moment I saw how you used Maxi in your logo, I thought I would like to use it too, but I couldn't find a suitable project. I was finally able to use it when after I saw photographs of the Balenciaga campaign that were going to be published in the September 2020 issue. I thought it would be great to use Maxi because it looks like single machine parts, which suited the tone of the shoot. The spreads were great with Maxi on its own, but to sync it with other spreads in the issue, we mixed Maxi and Favorit together. Maxi is a cute and cool typeface where each character has a sense of charm and unity—I think there is an infinite possibility to mix and match with it.

You've actually been one of our very first Favorit Hangul testers and feedbackers. How's that going?

A lot of time-consuming challenges have basically been solved by using Favorit Hangul. When Latin characters are included in Korea fonts, usually the Latin characters don’t work for the design we’re aiming for. So in this case, we’ll usually have to pair two fonts together ourselves.

Before using Favorit, we were typesetting body copy by mixing Hangul and Latin typefaces together. There were some issues with this: For instance, when using Korean and Latin typefaces, you have to make lots of detailed adjustments in the weights and sizes so that they fit together.

When I read the text after we'd adjusted two fonts like this, I often felt the subtle visual interruption. Plus it took a lot of time and effort to create an InDesign style list, and moving the document was slow due to the use of many greps. With Favorit though, it’s now possible to set up harmonious and smooth copy in both Korea and Latin. And handling the document is far easier. Now, when we’re using Gothic typefaces for body copy, Favorit is always our first consideration.

More generally, we’d love to know from your perspective: What are the current developments in the Hangul type world like at the moment? And is there something you wish you'd see more of?

It would be nice if the development of Hangul italics and scripts progressed a little more. However, I think it's a very difficult task for Korean typeface designers, as Hangul as significant structural differences from Latin typefaces and a much larger number of characters.

More generally, interest in Hangul type design is higher than it’s ever been, with more and more designers creating new typefaces. So now, more diverse Hangul typefaces and lettering are appearing and there’s a lot of research going into how to pair Hangul and Latin characters together. There’s also a great interest in variable fonts, which are very useful for alphabets with a large number of characters like Hangul!