Ji Lee is a designer and illustrator, born in Korea, raised in Brazil and currently living and working in New York.
Inspired by an art school typography class assignment almost twenty years ago, Lee has been since then working with the concept of creating images out of the letterforms of words that depict something of the meaning or character of that word.
The result is a long-term project Lee calls Word as Image.
(You will sometimes see logo designers trying to work with a similar concept, but in a more limited way.)
In 2011 Lee published a book, Word as Image, that collects 100 words.
A number of the word/images have been animated in a short film with animation by Bran Dougherty-Johnson that can be viewed on Lee’s site or on Vimeo.
On Lee’s website you will also find examples of his personal, professional and editorial work. I find the editorial selection exhibits much of the same kind of “turn things on their head” imagination as the Word as Image project.
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