Music Concert Poster

took 3 hours.

Photoshop Typography Poster

took 3 hours to brainstorm, outline, and design

this is the poster for my friend Brian Hong, who will organize KFLDT

If anyone wants photoshop tutorial, please comment

Fahrenheit 451

Dystopian novel <1984> by George Orwell well described the catastrophe of humanism brought by an application of wicked ideology. The book proposed the shivering images of the gloomy future, and influenced many writers of our generations, regardless of the genre they are engaged in.

<Fahrenheit 451> by Ray Bradbury is often compared to <1984>, due to their similar premises of dystopia. Dystopia is not the place where people are murdered and buildings are caved in by incessant gunfires and bombardments, but the condition that every human is deprived of contemplations and is controlled by brainwashes of mass media (usually directed by superpower, or government).

<1984> merely describes the crisis. George Orwell did great job in depicting the holistic scenery of his dystopia. Most of all, his description was powerful and persuasive, in other words, easy to understand, thus is still regarded as a decent novel (for me).

On the other hand, <Fahrenheit 451> focuses on sculpturing the inner thoughts of one individual 'Guy Montag'(Blizzard's Starcraft users may be familiar to this name). His agony is truly sympathizing, and the conundrums he confronts are still valid for the readers, including myself. Furthermore, Ray Bradbury gives deeper impressions to me, because he tells his story through implications, not depictions; and the most surprising fact is that, even though his implications may seem vague and abstract, the direction of such implications-all the metaphors he makes-is heading to one direction.

Great book, in conclusion.

CSIA Archive Project

  I am now scanning the donated notebooks, printing them out, and resizing the file for better readability. Starting with Lee. JH's AP Calculus notebook (the very first data I put into the archive), I'm now scanning AP physics notebook. The process goes like this:

1. get donation from seniors

2. classify the notebooks by subjects

3. scan the notebooks in library

4. mail the image files to my laptop (I wanted to use pdf format, but the pencil traces were not well scanned in pdf, so I'm now trying tiff format)

5. resize and rotate the images files

6. print the files out

7. retouch the blurry letters

8. scan the retouched image files again

9. modify the contrast in photoshop

10. upload in the website

  It takes approximately 4 hours to clone notebook into perfect web files. Though, it doesn't really bother me. Now, I just feel like one historian who excavates the carcasses buried in mud and carefully dusts the soil-coat from the skulls. Fascinating, I say.

Essay: Talking to Children about Death

Why need we urge the little children to be mature? The conversation about death between a boy and his parents remind me of one hilarious image-telling a sprout that it would end up as a fallen leaf. Explaining death to the children is more than giving a simple lesson in life. It’s rather teaching a philosophy of almost everything that happens in our lifespan, for it relates to both the start and the end of our lives, and the process that bridges them together.

When the barriers that isolated children from the death disappears, obviously, boys and girls will know more about death. In other words, they will feel more ‘natural’ with death. They will then recognize that the death is an inevitable destiny as they have more opportunities to observe death; not only the peaceful death of their grandfather, but also unexpected and unfortunate death of their brothers and sisters. Aging and disease are common causes of death, but on the other hand, we discover our people we know dying from accident, crime, or even worse, suicide. Contemplation on death is a holistic comprehension on lives of other people, and explaining why the deceased is lying inside the coffin is just a portion of broad comprehension. If such is the case, then can parents provide sufficient explanation, or more or less, justification about an individual’s unfortunate death? In the talk of death, parents bear one definite responsibility: they have to explain about ‘the society’ to their vulnerable children, about both its bright and dark sides. Whether the children would get the benefit from such conversations or would fall into endless nihilism is another question. Considering that many parents rely highly on religious interpretations to understand the individual’s death, such education won’t contribute to the establishment of child’s personal perspective.

In the Asian viewpoint, the funeral is not the symbol of morbidity. The funeral is rather a sacred ceremony. It is a ceremony in which people gather, bless the deceased, and commemorate the life of their beloved one. To understand the process, one should be aware of ‘suffering’, one should be aware of ‘passion’, and one should be aware of ‘felicity’. These are life lessons that mold empathy -that no children do possess- among the participants of the funeral. Such life lessons are the precipitation of personal experiences, thus no other adults can teach children about them. For parents never explained about the disappearance of his grandpa, a boy may have nightmares, and suffer from obsessed guilt, but such are all the process they should go through. If people do not fear death, why should they fear childhood trauma? Without those gradual understanding, one’s definition of death imposed by his parents, is just an empty philosophy.

Even if the parents are eager to tell their children about the death, what are they going to tell their children? Many family care organizations are suggesting ‘not to-do lists’ for parents, but none is mentioning ‘to-do lists’ for parents. This evinces one universal truth-that no one knows the truth on death. Thus in many cases, many parents try to offer pleasurable yet arbitrary explanations for death-a religion. Religious interpretations are appealing alternative to answer such complicated questions, and many parents teach their children the same story Jesus Christ preached to his students. Parents’ religious belief is not the subject of criticism, but their attempts to pass on their faith to naive children certainly are. Children have rights to fulfill their own obligations, and as human being, they even have responsibility to do so. Teaching them mature interpretations may help them, but at the same time, it will deprive of opportunities to establish their own perspective. Without building blocks, one’s comprehension can never be conclusive, and ‘immature’ philosophy of death would easily be shattered and splintered like a pile of glasses.

To understand a fallen leaf, a seed should endure the minutes of windstorm, the vernal breeze of spring, and the moments of aging. Perhaps, the only and first moment when one can finally understand the death may be the moment one falls off from the bough, the moment one’s body touches the cold ground blanketed in snow. From the start of the human civilization, the grown-ups isolated children from the deceased, and seeds had no chances to see the fallen leaves. That is not because people feared the death, but because they respected the humanity of the deceased, and furthermore respected the innocence of their children.

RIP Steve Jobs

I got inspirations from his presentation. 

His words and slides changed my paradigm of presentation.

Many people remember him as innovative CEO,

and so do I; and also, I remember him as great presenter.

"Keynote vs PowerPoint", he made it possible. Thank you Steve Jobs.

What I learned from 'Happy Brithday'

  Not a mistake, it was an intentionally made typo. This story-call it a tragedy or anything else-happened in our school 1 week ago and the lessons I learned from my misgivings. 

  If you are a careful reader, you might find hilarious error in the poster in the photo. I never thought that we are able to make such a significant error and never discover what's wrong with it. We attached this poster in our school's cafeteria to celebrate our school's 5th anniversary (my club PowerPoint User Group design a cafeteria poster monthly). I always emphasized to other fellow students never to use too many texts on single slide whenever they make PowerPoint slides, so we applied that philosophy in our poster. No other texts: no details about our school, no yearbooks, no flatters, but only one sentence... "Happy Birthday Cheongshim" (which supposed to be).


  We spent 2 hours to design this poster, and after sending photoshop file to print shop, we were so proud of ourselves. I clearly remember how excited we were... really, it was brilliant! The harmony of cyanic colors and graffiti arrows was dynamic, the sunburst gradient at the back of the poster added energy to the poster, and most of all, all the bursting images contributed in formation of depth within the whole texture. We just splattered all the brushes we had for 2 hours, erasing ditches and adjusting colors. Kind of messy works to do, but anyways we loved designing, and we didn't care a lot about those time-consuming processes.


  1 week later, the whole printing was finished, and next day, we got the printed poster from the print shop. We were all smiling, watching at the complete artwork, which would be remembered as a masterpiece in our club's history. We carried the package to the cafeteria, and cut out the yellow tape on it, and unrolled it. Till then, we didn't recognized the catastrophic mistake we made, so we were still smiling like pigs in the mud pool. Suddenly, while I was taking photo of my cheerful comrades holding our remarkable poster, I realized an idiosyncrasy of that blue poster. After that, it's no worth dictating it word by word. Still our 'glorious' poster is attached on the wall, and I'm planning to rip it off from the wall at the end of this week. 


  So, what did I learn from this shameful mistake? 


  First, bad reputation is more likely to be publicized than good one. No one ever noticed our cafeteria poster before, some did-more than 50-but not so much compared to this time. Many people asked me what's wrong with our design team, and I saw some people taking photo of this poster (fortunately, they didn't post it in Facebook). I don't want to blame them for being cruel. It's our mistake, and we should be responsible for that. Well, the fact is, I now recognize why mass media always talks about misgivings of celebrities and politicians. Those 'invaluable' information about their private lives, and those foolish things done either consciously and unconsciously by others, are better sources for gossip. Well, the hypothesis lacks concrete proofs, so I'll just say this is an educational guess derived from my experience. Okay, I now learned one idea for decent presentation. Tell the audiences shameful memories of yours, and more audiences will be interested in your story. 


  Second, the context is the most crucial factor I have to notice beforehand anything else. While designing PowerPoint slides, or posters, I and my team always focused on design, not the context. We copied some contents in the Wikipedia, and some from Korean encyclopedia, but never created them. Furthermore, we never 'double-checked' the texts within the poster, because we thought that no one would read it carefully-the major reason brought this pandemonium. One can recognize how obsessed we were in design , not in the context, if one notices the size of font (about 140, perhaps). No one can be that stupid to let such thing happen! Nevertheless, I now recognize why so many renowned presenters and slide designers emphasize the importance of the context. What matters is the contents you speak, not the animation (in presentation) or photoshop-made shapes and templates. Well, people notice "Happy Brithday" more than blue arrows we used, and they talk more about "Happy Brithday", so I think this is quite a reasonable conclusion.


  I got good lesson from this mistake, and for presenter like me, this experience is really valuable-I now got one more embarrassing story to tell to audiences! Hurrah! I believe this experience will expand my perspectives on presentation. So, to summarize...


1. Embarrassing moments of your life are great sources to use in your presentation
2. The context is what matters, not the design or templates.