The Times (and I) Have Designs on Ji Lee

It’s punny in here today. Weekend re-discovery: the designer and clearly awesome and brilliant Ji Lee. Here’s how it happened: I was reading Th...

It’s punny in here today.

Weekend re-discovery: the designer and clearly awesome and brilliant Ji Lee. Here’s how it happened: I was reading The Times. Then I saw this clever image above, illustrating the article “The American Wanderer, in All His Stripes”, about Mr. Obama’s transitory background.

I googled Mr. Lee and realized I had written about him previously, not knowing about his editorial work. Looks like he’s had quite the partnership with this paper; when I went back and looked at these illustrations, I remembered almost all of them.

Lee does tons of branding and design projects and still has time for his own work. A graduate of Parsons in 1995, he also has the little title of Creative Director at Google Creative Lab. Color me impressed.

Anyway, he and Nicholas Blechman at The Times seem to have a nice partnership. Here are some noteworthy tears. I’ll show you some other stuff down below, from Newsweek and Cheerios and Tylenol and such. And the best business card ever.

The 10 Best Books of the Year
Creative Director: Nicholas Blechman

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Ethics of Killing for Food
Article By Frank Bruni / Photography by Daniel Root / Creative Director: Nicholas Blechman

Whole Foods announced that it would no longer sell live lobsters,
saying that keeping them in crammed tanks for long periods doesn’t
demonstrate a proper concern for animal welfare. Nonetheless, the
lobsters are being killed anyway to be eaten by the consumers. This
article discusses the ethics involved in killing animals for food.

Red Cross Dilemma
Article by Stephanie Strom / Creative Director: Joon Mo Kang

Article about the financial crisis Red Cross is facing by the
increasing trend of donors who want to contribute for specific causes
which makes it hard for the Red Cross to raise money for its own
internal financial needs.

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“Falling Man” by Don DeLillo / Article by Frank Rich / Creative Director: Nicholas Blechman
A novel about a man who survives 9/11.

Newsweek
Challenge: Create a brand campaign for Newsweek magazine.
Solution: Juxtapose images from the news to provide a unique editorial perspective on current issues.

Tylenol
Challenge: Create a brand campaign to position Tylenol as the leader in the pain-relief medicine category.

Solution: Ads as a pain-relief.

Cheerios
Print campaign to communicate Cheerios have five different flavors.

New Museum (reveal)

We poured drips of magenta ink on top of the Calvin Klein Billboard on
one of the most prominent streets in downtown New York. Dripping
increased as days progressed, and so did the mystery surrounding it.
Thousands of New Yorkers were puzzled and dozens of blogs started to
write about this mystery until the reveal happened a few days later.

By this days there were dozens of newspaper and magazine articles
and hundreds of blogs around the world who covered the mystery about
the “splashed” CK billboard.

This logo is based on the most iconic feature of the New Museum: The unique shape of the building

Often I don’t remember who’s the person in the business cards in
my wallet. With this in mind, I wanted to create a memorable card where
people can make notes about me in the back on my card.

clever clever clever.