When you’re offered the possibility to attend a lecture by Ji Lee, you don’t hesitate. You grab it, you go and you scribble away to take in as much as possible from what he has to tell!  So here’s a little resume of his first lecture in Belgium, held at Design at Work in Kortrijk last month.

Ji Lee was born in Korea, raised in Brazil and currently lives and works in New York. He’s a Bachelor in Fine Arts at the Parsons School of Design, started his career at Saatchi & Saatchi, followed by Droga5.  Today he works as the Creative Director of Google Creative Lab and at the same time, coordinates his own projects as designer.

“Professional + Personal = Awesome” was a lecture on how your personal projects and experiences can improve your professional performance and vice versa, if you find the right balance between both worlds.   Most people keep their professional life strictly separate from their private projects : professionally, they are driven moneywise while personal projects are entirely heartfelt. In his lecture, Ji Lee shared his experience of how personal and professional projects can complement and help each other, bringing forth awesome results.

At Google they have a pretty flat hierarchy: anyone can come up with ideas, like Google Search Stories wich was an idea of one of their interns. They seek people with a real entrepreneurial mindset and employees are allowed to spend 20% of their time on personal projects during working hours. Many new Google projects come from these personal concepts.

For Ji Lee, ideas are nothing and doing is everything. And if it doesn’t work, you try something different. He gave some practical examples of projects he has realized to support his arguments:

1.     Univers Revolved Font : 3D Alphabet

This is a project he made as a student.  Each character of the alphabet is folded 360° around an axis, creating a 3 dimensional shape. With those 3 dimensional shapes, objects and shapes are created which literally “tell” what they are. Reading becomes more fun this way and his findings are that children can read it much easier than adults because they’re not as stuck in patterns and habits as adults are.
Derived from this concept came Google for Macworld; creating an attractive, creative and recognizable visualization of the Google logo.

2.    The Bubbleproject

Being fed up by the fact that our public spaces are overrun with meaningless ads, he started the Bubbleproject. It’s all about the importance of fun & sharing.  By re-using existing media and giving it a voice in an accessible and inviting way, he tried to encourage participation and interaction. The empty bubbles were often completed by the passerby, resulting in all kind of reactions: from funny over criticizing to political statements and art.
The website where he offered a downloadable version of the bubble had an average of 50 to 100 visits per day, until it got mentioned on BoingBoing, causing 15.000 hits and his site to temporarily go down. The project even made it to ABC Worldwide News.

3.    The New Museum

After the Bubbleproject, he was asked to work for Droga5 and did a campaign for the New Museum.
The logo is based on the most iconic feature of the New Museum: the unique shape of the building. He took the striking contours of the building, made cut-out posters of it and stuck them on existing ads, thus making the billboards an abstract artwork. The keyhole effect aroused the interest of the spectator even more.
They also build bikes in the same form. Ji Lee showed a photo of a man looking very intrigued at one of the bikes and said that such a reaction is the greatest reward for an ad: to intrigue people so that they feel the urge to find out what it is about.

4.    Many of google’s applications are still unknown to the public and a way to promote these, is by creating original concepts:

-      What is a browser? examined how many people knew what a browser is and how many of them knew the difference with a search engine (8% of the questioned people in NY).
This resulted in Chrome shorts, a series of short movies made by creative people about Google’s new browser, Google Chrome, to make users aware of the difference and to demonstrate why they need a good browser.

-      Another example was Favorite places on Googlemaps.

To promote google maps they asked celebrities to pinpoint their favourite  spots on a map and add a little comment explaining what that place means to them. Custom real life pins were designed for each participant and 3D pins were placed at those locations.

-      By making everything open source, others can use the applications to create their own and these are grouped on Chrome Experiments.
As not everything can be shown under the name Google due to copyrights, Ji Lee started Goollery: a collection of concepts and applications based on google.

To end his lecture, he gave a list of 5 things he learned thus far:
·     Professional and personal projects can complement each other
·     Good things happen when he’s having fun with his projects
·     Platforms are powerful and scalable
·     Sharing is rewarding
·     Ideas are nothing. Doing is everything

More projects can be found on Please Enjoy – The work of Ji Lee