Articles · Community
Where Korean designers talk to each other
When you want to read, when you want to show your work, when you need an answer fast. Korea's design communities, sorted by what they're good for.
Translated from the Korean original. Read in Korean
Working alone, you sometimes get hungry for conversation.
Can I use this font commercially? Is this quote reasonable? What tools is everyone using these days? It feels like a search should answer it, but all you find are posts from years ago. At times like that, what you need is people more than information.
So you start poking around communities. Join one or two and before long it's more than ten, and all you collect are notifications. A foot in every door, and yet you don't really belong anywhere.
After wandering for a long time, I learned that each community is good at something different. No place does it all.
A note for readers outside Korea: most of the places below are Korean-language services. I've kept them as they are, since this is a map of the Korean design scene.
When you want to read
Surfit gathers design and product writing scattered across the web onto one screen. Good for skimming on the commute. The upside is discovering outlets you didn't know; the downside is pretending you read things and scrolling past.
Yozm IT has lots of long pieces written by practitioners. It isn't design-only, but many topics straddle product and engineering, so you end up reading about your collaboration frustrations from the other side. That turns out to be oddly comforting.
When I miss talk about graphic, spatial or industrial design, I go to Design Jungle or Monthly Design. Online design discourse in Korea leans toward UI and product, so for exhibitions, competitions and interviews with people in the industry, these are much richer. Design Press shows brand and space stories mostly through photos.
When you want to put your work out there
Disquiet is where people post side projects and document the making. Unlike portfolio sites that only show the result, the culture there is to write about why you made something and where you stumbled. If you're building something on your own, it's a good place to get first reactions.
Brunch makes long-form writing easy. Quite a few designers write retrospectives and notes on how they work there, and it has its own readers who arrive through search.
To show your work, it's Notefolio in Korea and, internationally, still Behance and Dribbble. Behance shows the flow of an entire project; Dribbble competes on the polish of a single shot. For web work, just looking at the award winners on GDWEB or DBCUT tells you where Korean web design is heading.
When you're thinking about your career
On Careerly, short posts, questions and answers from working professionals circulate together. Things search won't give you, like the culture at a specific company or switching roles, surface here.
I also check job services like Wanted or Rallit now and then. Even with no plans to move, reading job descriptions shows you what the market wants from designers right now. Once every six months is enough. Job sites are collected under Jobs.
Company reviews I take only as reference. The people with complaints write more diligently, so they tend to lean one way.
The fastest place, and the fastest forgotten
The quickest answers come from KakaoTalk open chat rooms or Discord. Printer recommendations, reading a font license, a feel for pricing. For these, asking people is far faster than searching.
Two things are worth knowing going in. Most ban advertising; if you want to promote your work or service, it's polite to ask the host first. And the conversation flows away. Even a great answer is buried far up the scroll by the next day. Anything useful needs to be copied down somewhere as you go.
Three is enough
Rather than a foot in ten doors, cutting down to one place per purpose, about three, lasts longer. One place to read, one place to write your own story, one place to ask when you're in a hurry.
And wherever it is, it's good to write at least a line. The people who get the most out of a community are usually the ones who wrote something. Even one question, one comment.
I made a spot like that on this site too, Design Talk, though it's a Korean-language board for now. The full list of other places is under Community & Media.