In a crisis of democracy what role can graphic designers play? Everyday Practice imparts its insights

Like many South Koreans, the Seoul-based design studio Everyday Practice was called to rethink the meaning of democracy on 3 of December 2024, when South Korea’s former president Yoon Suk Yeol tried to put the country under martial law for the first time in over four decades.

Founded by Kwon Joonho, Kim Kyung-chul and Kim Eojin as a design practice that “ponders what role design should play in the reality we live in today”, this threat to democracy on the studios doorstep was a call for Everyday Practice to reevaluate the role of the graphic designer in political emergencies. “We have the power to visualise messages in a contemporary visual language and communicate them to the public,” says Kwon. “This is a very special ability, and in times of crisis in our society, we are called upon to determine and execute what textual contexts need to be communicated and disseminated.”

Amidst the turmoil, the studio began working on a Zeitgeist poster project, aiming to craft a collaborative response to the political landscape. The team worked with over sixty designers across the country to produce political posters based on a series of declarations from the past to the present, issued by South Korean citizens whenever the country has experienced a crisis of democracy.

“In South Korea, in particular, various civil society organisations, students, and workers have issued declarations in response to crises of democracy, and the texts have been highly specific to the country’s time and political context”, explains Kwon. “We chose a single sentence from each of the long declarations that could convey the core of the text’s content, and we thought this would be most powerful if it was visualised in the medium of a poster.”

Contributions were much more abundant than the team initially anticipated. Although many Korean designers are “very careful about revealing their political and social positions”, says Kwon, a large number of creatives readily accepted their brief in the circumstance. “Many designers thought about what they could do as citizens in such a situation, but it was not clear what they should do”, he says. “When we suggested that they speak out about the current crisis of democracy through a series of declarations from the past to the present, many designers readily accepted. Superseding the initial goal of recruiting 30 designers, the project has expanded into a collaboration amongst over 60 designers and counting, with posters being uploaded to each designer’s social media accounts since early January, in the lead up to the launch of the projects online site today.

Having produced a plethora of impactful posters of all shapes and styles, with contributions from the likes of Na Kim, Jin Dallae & Park Woohyuk and Sparks Edition, as well as graphic design studio General Graphics, Lift-Off and more, the Zeitgeist project is still piling up prints. As the growing collective of designers continue to inspire more designers to respond with their own poster designs, the studio have managed to organise an exhibition of all of the works to date at the Realation Space in Seoul, due to show from the 26 of February to 16 March 2025. Alongside the exhibition the contributors plan to produce a book to house the poster collection having gained further support for its print and production.

On the impact that the studio hopes the project has, founder Kwon shares: “If designers remain silent on these common sense issues, they may be bystanders who are giving a free ride to a democracy that was built at someone else’s expense. I want this project to show that designers, who have so far been indifferent to social issues, can play a role in repairing social disruption using the weapon we call design.”