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Book Design
Research-Driven Visual Essay, Book Design, Typography, Visual System, Editorial Layout, Image Treatment
Created a research-driven visual essay book that examines micro-utopias in everyday life, integrating structured writing, typographic systems, and curated image treatments to make contradictory social behaviors more legible and comparable through reading. Guided the full creative workflow from daily observation and framework building through narrative structure, editorial layout, and production-ready book design in InDesign, with image processing and visual refinement in Photoshop and Illustrator, translating scattered cultural signals into a cohesive, revisitable publication experience.
Built from long-term observation of contemporary online and offline behaviors, this project frames “micro-utopias” as small, repeatable practices people use to stabilize emotion and regain a sense of control in everyday life.
The project’s objective was to create a research-driven visual essay in book form that makes these contradictory phenomena visible and readable through design. By combining structured writing, typographic hierarchy, image treatment, and editorial composition, the book turns scattered cultural signals into a coherent system that can be revisited and compared.
I repeatedly noticed that the same objects and behaviors often receive opposite judgments. Blind boxes, luxury displays, “original or non-commercial use only” labels, academic credential showcasing, and exhibition check-ins are criticized as consumerism or showing off, yet also defended as emotional anchoring and self-protection. Similar contradictions appear offline, where people worry about minor waste but ignore larger ones, or advocate rational consumption while continuing to pay for souvenirs and “useless” collectibles. These actions resist functional explanation, but persist emotionally.
My approach was to treat contradiction itself as the subject rather than something to resolve. Instead of building a single argument, the book uses parallel sequences, repetition, juxtaposition, and pacing to create structural conditions for multiple interpretations to coexist. It functions as a navigable research framework where readers can move between viewpoints, pause, re-evaluate, and form their own understanding of how everyday micro-utopias operate within existing social structures.
The book guides reading through structured juxtaposition and controlled rhythm, encouraging readers to move between disagreement, pause, and re-evaluation. A dual-title system is used to delay judgment: the main title points directly to a behavior or object, while the subtitle frames common critiques and counter-readings as questions, preventing any single stance from dominating.
Visually, I avoided polished commercial imagery and worked with everyday photographs. Through pixelation, repetition, cropping, and rearrangement, images are stripped of fixed context and reshaped into reusable visual units. Color and typography function as narrative tools, using high-contrast saturated blocks to separate sections without assigning preset meaning, while generous whitespace creates necessary pauses for reflection. Together, these choices build a revisitable field where phenomena can be read, compared, and reinterpreted over time.
To extend the visual essay into a tangible experience, the book includes modular components such as camera watermark frames, book-list cards, award sheets, certificates, invitation cards, and wrapping paper. These elements draw from recognizable social symbols in contemporary life, and their function is intentionally open-ended. Their value is established in the moment they are seen, displayed, or anticipated, mirroring how symbolic labels often perform emotional work before they are ever verified.
This project clarified that design does not always need to solve problems or declare a stance. It can also function as an analytical tool that structures reality and delays judgment. Micro-utopias are not alternatives to life, but everyday mechanisms that offer temporary psychological stability through symbols, objects, and repeatable behaviors.
By using the visual essay format, the book organizes recurring phenomena into a coherent reading space where multiple interpretations can coexist without being reduced to a single conclusion. Moving forward, I hope to continue exploring design as an analytical medium across cultural and interdisciplinary contexts, creating cognitive spaces where people can pause, reflect, and reorient.