Winter 2025 - WINNER

Visual Trading Cards

This project transforms personal writing into a series of collectible trading cards, reframing vulnerability as an object of design, circulation, and exchange. The work began with rediscovering journal entries and essays written in 2022. Rather than discarding them, I edited and distilled the strongest fragments and textualized them through bold, expressive visual design. The visual system is built around manipulated star forms, which function as both a graphic motif and a conceptual anchor. The stars reference my personal tagline, Rising Design Star, symbolizing growth, visibility, and self-authorship. By experimenting with different star shapes, scales, and distortions, I translated personality into form, allowing the compositions to feel energetic, playful, and intentionally loud. Influenced by feedback that my Korean writing carries a poetic and performative quality, I leaned into excess through vibrant typography, ornamental layouts, and dramatic contrasts. The heightened visuals act as both amplification and protection, creating a buffer that allows intimate writing to exist confidently in a public space. The trading card format turns private writing into a tactile, collectible artifact. Printing and physically distributing the cards completes the work, shifting the project from a static archive to a social object. Viewers are invited to encounter, exchange, and keep fragments of personal narrative, blurring the boundary between introspective writing and public identity. This project explores self-curation, memory, and how graphic design can function as both armor and spotlight for personal expression.