Gin Kim

SPECS Gallery Logo

gin — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 16:04:40 +0000

Specs Gallery is a CIC (Community Interest Company), whose aim is to showcase the work of emerging visual artists within the London area. We operate a ‘pop-up’ gallery model, meaning our only permanent gallery space is online. We use empty properties around the city to exhibit our shows, providing not only a flexible and unique gallery environment, but also contributing to the regeneration of the city at a time when more properties are empty than ever before. (http://specsgallery.co.uk/)

Harry and Alice, two good friends of mine from MA Creative Economy at Kingston Uni, who founded this company asked me to design a logo for their new adventure. I just wanted to make it rough in a way that it shows its concept as a ‘pop up’ gallery introducing young emerging artists in London.

Hand-made labels

Passport2guide Logo

gin — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 17:35:14 +0000

Prototypes

This was a project that I did during my MA in the Creative Economy. Our business was about a stylish town guide in ‘Passport size’. We ended up starting from online town guide due to the printing cost but the logo was designed from the initial idea of passport sized guide as its name says.

2 criteria for this logo was to keep the look & feel of the conventional Passport cover but still look young and trendy!

I realised that most passports have ‘Crest’ on the cover aligned in the center – apart from the swiss passport. Then I selected some icons related to our contents – food, club, shops etc and put them randomly to make it look like a crest. Et voila!

IKAWA Logo

gin — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 16:34:39 +0000

About IKAWA _ from design london

Two design graduates of the RCA’s IDE course have designed a system that disint ermediates most of the value in the supply chain of coffee, and links the coffee drinker directly to the coffee farmer. Green coffee beans are ordered on the web, despatched to the home and are roasted, roast and ground or roast, ground and brewed in an IKAWA’s coffee maker, providing the drinker with the freshest possible coffee at the press of a button.

One of the founders of IKAWA is a friend of my friend so we designed a simple yet straight forward logo for this company.

http://www.ikawacoffee.com/

Designer, Manufacturer & Contemporary Design Retail Business

gin — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 23:11:11 +0000

“Have you ever bought a chair for £150?”

I was asked, with little expectation of a positive answer, during my first job interview for the position of a designer. Let leave a chair with ticket price of £150, I had never bought a single piece of furniture at that point in my life. Ironically this is a rather common predicament for fresh graduates of design school. However the question indicates the criticism towards the mindset of most young designers who expect consumers to pay good hard-earned money for their designs without knowing its value through an actual experience of buying. This also highlights the specificities and contradictions of the design industry.

This question leads me to explore the economy of design industry. To initiate this research, I have focused on contemporary design retail business as one of the most desirable business formats for designers, yet not the most interesting subject for economists or researchers due to the fact that the sector remains comparatively small in terms of both individual size and overall market share.

|Abstract|
This research aims to analyse the high-end design and furniture industry in order to find out the hidden structure and correlation between designers, manufacturers and retailers within the deign industry. This research will explore a broad range of context around the furniture and design industry especially focusing on the impact of the economic downturn and the tide of e-commerce on the research area. To understand the internal issues within the businesses, the literatures about the small business sector have been reviewed with greater emphasis on starting up a business, management, marketing and finance.

This research contains both quantitative and qualitative data that are collected via unstructured and structured interviews, a questionnaire and online research. In order to understand a real life phenomenon within the context, case studies are developed based on interviews as well as secondary data. Findings are analysed and synthesised in the form of diagrams.

From manufacturers to customers
- Competitiveness of contemporary design retail business and its channels of communication.
- (Left) Correlations between well established global furniture brands and well established design shops in London.
- (Right) Assessment of the product range and marketing channel of contemporary design retail business in London, 2010

Diversification of retail channels

Traditional structure of the design industry from designers to individual customers.

- Current trend of the diversification of retail channels for designers and manufacturers as well as retailers

(This is from my dissertation about contemporary design retail business in London)

Sensory Alarm Clock

gin — Tue, 25 May 2010 23:11:52 +0000

Alarm clock is one of the oldest and the most typical products representing the modern urban life. This tiny object or waking-up function itself absorbed in different forms – mobile phone, radio or even the laptop- cristalise the fate of modern people having to wake up against what their body wants and the clock of the nature. You hate it but you can’t avoid it to survive in busy urban life.

The aim of ‘Glorious morning’ project is to bring the first, hence the most important activity of the day – or the first obstacle of the day for some – waking up in the morning, on the table, analyse and explore how we can wake up more pleasantly, naturally yet effectively. This project is exploring possibilities on both sound and smell to bring ‘Glorious morning’ to numerous people struggling to wake up in every morning including me!

Some pages from the final report

idea 1| sensory wake up

Sense Exhibition

gin — Sun, 23 May 2010 00:08:21 +0000

Collective Design Project | The final book was organised and designed by GinKim.
Website: http://www.wix.com/noviardi_prasetya/sense-exhibition

Final Presentation – Passport2guides.com

gin — Thu, 20 May 2010 23:33:21 +0000

1 Mar. – 11 Mar. addicted to Passport2guides.com

gin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:34:46 +0000

Honestly, for last 2 weeks, I’ve been obsessed with this website doing nothing else (completely forgetting about miguel’s essay, smell project of my design module, my own blog updates and even food…damn!) But it’s been such a pleasure to see the progress that our team is making, and wanted to contribute as much as possible, and it’s never enough. Now we have 44 published posts, and 19 drafts. We’ve been visiting shops, talking to people, and give our biz cards away. OK let’s make some points.

1 Mar. Yvonne found a shop to sponsor our competition by offering a lovely panda bag! Well done Yvonne!

2 Mar. Team meeting (11am-7pm)
- Filming for our ad
- Visiting our ‘sponsor shop’ to thank and to take more pictures! (Thank you ‘Octopus’!)
- Lunch at Kingston Mill for our website updates
- Working at Woody’s for our website updates, and website design with Pinar

3. Mar. Working at Woody’s again (2pm-8pm)
Talked with the manager and showed our website post of the bar. He really appreciated that

4. Mar. Working at Kingston Hill all day (9.30am-6pm)
Had meeting with Catherine in the morning, then again work, work, work!

Well, then I got sick and couldn’t go to school on Friday…. and then lost my wallet again on saturday…it’s a bit stupid but anyway, we’ve achieved quite a lot of things for this last 2 weeks.

Website updates
44 posts, 19 drafts, & a lot more to come!

Our first ad by Seb

Our business card

Passport2guides exclusive Kingston Town guide map!
(more detailed shop guide map to come later)

Our competition poster

trials

hopefully final?

Our competition prize
- Panda bag
- Free meal voucher at Korean restaurant ‘Phoenix’, Raynes park (Thank you Cristina!)
- (TBC) Discount voucher from KAI’s kitchen

Visit our website and be our fan on facebook!
www.passport2guides.com
http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/pages/Passport2guidescom/357716367021?ref=ts

20 Feb – 25 Feb Work in progress

gin — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:59:40 +0000

Last week was pretty much of business project week. How many hours? pffff can’t count… I spent 4 days fully dedicating on business project…

20 Feb. Saturday : taking pictures & video of shops in Norbiton / Borough Market, Meeting with pinar

21 Feb. Sunday : Blog posting, contents making

22 Feb. Monday : morning – field research in Kingston (taking pictures & videos of shops in Kingston), afternoon – making contents (selecting pictures and writing reviews)

24 Feb. Wednesday : went to Marketing Forum (TFM) with Pinar & Seb

25 Feb. Thursday : Team meeting at 3 at Southbank till 6 / Contents making around Southbank centre from 6-9 / Uploading contents on our website 10-2am

I just realised that making contents needs a lot of time and efforts as well as ‘Money’ as I have to try by myself to write a reliable review! But it’s been quite fun, and it’s good to see our website with more and more contents from all of our team members. Great!

Sense Exhibition

gin — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:59:27 +0000

Sense Exhibition that made my January so busy.

Sense Exhibition : Smell me (Thank you Corrine for the good feedback)

Process journey

Since the new term started, we got 3 weeks to prepare the exhibition from concept development to execution as well as the final documentation. I was in charge of finalising the document (editing on Indesign, the most tedious part…) and also doing the coordination throughout this period while making lots of cocoons as well. By consequence, I physically haven’t had time to spend on our business project that I feel so sorry to the rest of team members…and also for myself. But hopefully february will be the business project month and will get it done!

Otherwise, the exhibition was quite successful, and I really appreciate Corrine and Maces for coming to see it!