When Chanmi Grace handed me her business card I almost asked her to design mine right there on the spot. Her cards are slightly wider than average and they’re thick enough to be used as a weapon. Seriously, these corners could take an eye out. Moreover, the eye-catching visual identity she designed for herself looks like a chemistry formula with the letters in her name standing in for elements. Coincidentally, her name includes some of the main elements for basic life: C (carbon), N (nitrogen) and H (hydrogen). I love how she plays with letterforms, stretching out the C in Grace to the length of two letters so both names take up the same amount of space even though they have a different number of letters.
Her typeface Dodu Curbe is a sophisticated serif that’s also readable. The slightly elongated lines gives it an elegant, swan-like appearance.
Chanmi describes it as “a modern typeface, but more formal in appearance…[with] slightly higher visibility by giving more weight to serif. The font is a modern, neoclassic typeface in reaction to experimentation with proportions. The descender is slightly shorter and extended compared to other modern typefaces like Didot and Bodoni.”
She also has a knack for poster design. I actually thought her 1980s posters was a book series for “The Best of Everything,” “The Power of Everything” and “The Worst of Everything” from the decade. It’s clever, as is her “mirrored” identity for the Fashion Museum. The logo (in the bottom corner of the poster, below) actually makes me a bit dizzy, but conceptually I think it works. “The Fashion Museum located in Bath, England has a historical collection ranging from late 16th century to now. This collection has an active quality which is reminiscent of the back-and-forth development of fashion. Therefore, the identity brings an aspect of motion, exposed by giving the letterform a sliced-mirror effect.”
