A nostalgic approach to analog media dictates Studio Front-Door’s publishing-focused practice
“When we were young, many people bought paper tickets to take the metro, some read books on trains or in parks, collected CDs and wrote letters. We still love analog media like that,” begins Minjung Kang from Studio Front-Door. “That’s not to say things that exist in the real world are better than digital media, we just like something we can touch with our hands.” With this thought, and the fact that Studio Front-Door was founded with the primary mission of creating “a book that could rival the iPad – beautiful and firm”, the studio has always focused on the production potential physical graphic to rival an online book. world. And this nostalgic approach to physical media has served the studio well. Recently launching its own publishing business alongside its graphic work, Front-Door now stands out for creating well-conceptualized, thoroughly researched and meticulously detailed publications.
For his catalog design Art(ificial) Garden, The Border Between Us, the studio wanted to mimic the basic concept of the text. Created for an exhibition that explored the relationship between humans and nature and the issue of boundaries, Kyung Min (the other half of Studio Front-Door) expands that “”We” refers to human nature, and the art, and at the same time, is a Korean namesake (Woori), meaning fence”. With this in mind, the studio sought to express the idea of both visible and invisible borders, executed by making the letters of the title visible to through the cover’s checkered pattern. Equally innovative, Front-Door recently created a series of publications focusing on a 1970s collaboration between an American public broadcasting station and video artist Nam June Paik. Drawing inspiration from the pattern “of a cathode ray tube, reminiscent of an analog television,” the seven covers demonstrate an effortless vintage digital style. And, additionally, tucked into the bottom right corner of the pages, the studio has included a brown TV graphic with captured footage. apart from shooting videos of Nam June Piak, which when flipped look like watching the video.