Duration: Five years.

Location: Seoul, South Korea.

Key creatives: Ye-Seul Jeong, Min-Kyeong Kang, Ga-Young Kim and Gye-Hyeon Park. We all met while studying visual communication design at the Seoul Women’s University and established Ore-Oh! upon our graduation in 2016.

Career path: When we were all starting university, we had to take an art test. Then, we all majored in visual communication design. And now, of course, we have founded Ore-Oh! studio. It’s dangerous to generalize, but a typical characteristic of Korean education is that it’s extremely uncommon to change career paths. Naturally, we could have found work in agencies or other design studios, but we wanted to achieve everything we could in our own practice.

As Ore-Oh!, we create a variety of visual designs for clients mainly in the cultural and artistic fields. Recently, we branched out to art directing for musicians and creating public design works. We feel incredibly thankful that we’re able to work in various areas of design because of the wide range of fields it can offer.

Cultural influences: We are particularly influenced by the online and offline environments surrounding us. There are many ways to acquire information and inspiration, from album design and from the crafts of various materials in Korea and abroad. However, we go out of our way to experience different things outside the realms of design, rather than staying glued to our desks. When we need to find more fuel for our work, we step away and immerse ourselves in something unrelated.

Favorite projects: LEENALCHI, the band that we’re currently art directing. We are working on the band’s overall visual design and collaborating on music videos with various artists. We find synergy in working with a variety of designers on LEENALCHI’s project, so it is a huge leap forward for us.

Approach: Our members have different tastes and perspectives; therefore, we respect each other, and feel refreshed when we look at each other’s work. We find it difficult to articulate our style and couldn’t tell you definite features in our projects. However, people have said that our work looks simple and cool. This simplicity leads to a chunky visual configuration that has become our specialty. We also used to want to finish everything by ourselves, but now we have become open to working with other designers and artists. We think that it gives us more inspiration and motivation.

Aspirations: We’d like to create and sell merchandise as a studio project. We hope that this will also help us grow our business overseas.

Philosophy: It is important to gracefully express the clients’ purposes and what they want in our design, so we communicate a lot when we work with them. However, the visual aesthetic is important too, because as a design studio, we must persuade people through visuals instead of words.

Nowadays, during the coronavirus pandemic, we think about how important it is to manage our physical health. We have also started doing exercises like jujitsu, pilates and yoga, and we all work from home. It feels very much like freelancing.

Anything else? We hope that the situation for design copyrights and paying designers fairly for their work will improve.