This is the 15th in a series highlighting women and their accomplishments in the various facets of the Korean entertainment industry. ― Ed.


While you may be unfamiliar with the name Lee Shin, chances are you’ve come across her work on album covers or even used one of the series of emoticons she designed for KakaoTalk. “Foul-Mouthed Grandma” and the “Dog Series” have been particularly popular.

As the design director at Hansigan, Lee develops the concepts for characters and leads the team that designs them. By reading current trends, she knows how to create characters that people will like.

“I try to get inspiration from the current trends,” she said. “Back then it was more of a cutesy thing, but now it’s more realistic. Like about drinking. Nowadays the perceptions have changed.”

The emoticons and characters that she develops now are often pictured drinking, hungover or yelling obscenities, and are often violent. But she says they express what people want to say.

“Before there were a lot of restrictions and censoring (by the companies). There is a lot more freedom now,” she said.

In her 16-year career, she’s designed everything from album covers to avatars, book covers, dolls and bags along with emoticons. The only thing she hasn’t designed, she said, was clothing.

Lee said becoming a designer, and now a director, was a natural progression for her. She went to a good art university and studied abroad, so it was only natural that she would choose this area of work. Also, she said she enjoys drawing characters, though she admitted that since becoming a director it’s gotten a bit harder to draw.

She doesn’t really see what she does as art, since most of the time she is developing content at the request of clients. She joked that she designs to survive and it’s the only thing she’s good at. But she appreciates that the field is constantly changing as technology advances.

“There are a lot of new things you can do. While you’re staying in this market, this business, new things come up,” she said. In the past, she said there wasn’t much around that she could design other than portal sites, but now there are cellphone messengers, social media, websites and more.

She gets the most joy out of seeing her own finished products on the market ― the ones she designs on her own rather than for a client ― and a lot of people using them. Lee’s favorite character to date is Foul-Mouthed Grandma, which she says reminds her a lot of herself.

Her company at the moment is working on creating online cartoons featuring the characters they’ve created ― such as the grandma and dog series ― to make them more familiar to the public.

It is also working on expanding to places like China and Japan. Lee said the wall that once existed between Korea and foreign markets has been broken down.

She said that in the future, the company would also like to develop its own messenger, so that it won’t have to rely on other messenger apps to sell its content, which often cuts into profits.

As a personal goal, she said she would like to try her hand at animation someday.

Throughout her career, Lee has designed avatars for portal sites and Cyworld, and even worked at movie production company Yongari designing characters for movies along with character merchandise. She said she’s also designed the album covers for hip-hop artists such as Bulhandang crew, Insane Deegie’s “2 Jazzy 4 Hip-Hop” series and the latest single coming out by Born Kim and Artisan Beats.

Throughout it all, everything she does falls back on her ability to read trends since a popular character can sell like crazy.

“Everything collapses at a certain point. So, a creator like me who creates content, I really can’t predict the future,” she said. “We’re just doing whatever we can to come up with creative content and read the trends.”

By Emma Kalka (ekalka@heraldcorp.com)