Category: Communication Design

What makes K-Pop packaging so unique is how it turns a music release into a collectible experience. Albums are not just containers for songs, they’re extensions of the group’s concept, often acting as physical embodiments of their visual and gender narrative.

Through my genre experiments, I began to notice just how tightly album design is tied to the styling and gender presentation of a comeback. In an Electronic concept, the packaging might feature glitch aesthetics, holographic materials, and minimal typography. In a Classical-inspired release, one might expect textured paper, serif fonts, gold foil, and portrait-style photography. These choices reinforce the persona and mood the group is performing.

K-Pop packaging uses everything, photobooks, postcards, posters, even the way the CD is tucked into the case to tell a visual story. And because styling plays such a central role in constructing gender identities, those same visual codes carry over into the packaging: softness versus structure, vulnerability versus power, natural versus artificial.

In essence, album packaging becomes an archive of a concept, preserving not just the sound but the gendered visual world that accompanied it. It’s branding, storytelling, and identity-making, all in one object.

In K-Pop, fashion and makeup are key tools for constructing gender narratives. These aren’t just surface-level aesthetics, they actively shape how idols are perceived, interpreted, and emotionally engaged with.

Throughout my research, I observed that K-Pop boy groups constantly move between traditionally “masculine” and “feminine” styling cues. One comeback might feature structured military jackets and leather, another soft pastels, lace, or glossy skin. Makeup plays a crucial role here, highlighting certain features (eyes, lips, jawlines) to either sharpen or soften a member’s look, depending on the concept.

This flexibility doesn’t dilute identity, it expands it. It invites fans to see masculinity as multi-faceted, emotional, and performative. In many ways, K-Pop creates space for gender as performance, much like drag or theatre, but within a mainstream pop format. Importantly, this kind of gender play is made digestible and aspirational through the high production quality of styling, visuals, and controlled group dynamics.

Each visual concept becomes a new lens through which to explore and project identity, not as fixed, but as curated and expressive. And fans engage deeply with this process, decoding meanings, reading emotions, and connecting with idols based on how their image evolves over time.

After experimenting with Electronic, Lofi, and Classical music genres, returning to K-Pop feels like coming back to a language I know, but now with a deeper understanding of what makes it so special. The genre-blending journey allowed me to momentarily remove K-Pop from its typical aesthetic environment and ask: what remains when we strip away the gloss and recontextualize it?

What stood out most is how visually versatile yet identity-focused K-Pop is. Unlike Lofi or Classical, where the aesthetic can overshadow the individual, K-Pop insists on keeping the idol at the center. This centrality enables gender identity to be fluid, stylized, and emotionally legible, especially through fashion and makeup.

Fashion in K-Pop is not just styling, it’s character-building. Masculinity can mean smoky eyeliner, cropped knits, or harnesses, femininity can exist within a boy group’s soft gaze, sheer fabrics, or flower-strewn visuals. The genre doesn’t collapse gender, it performs and stretches it, borrowing freely from both sides while always pushing aesthetic boundaries.

These experiments made me realize that K-Pop’s success lies in its hyper-design and intentional ambiguity. It allows for brief detours, like classical elegance or digital abstraction, but always returns to the idol as a canvas for complex identity-making.

Branding in Classical Music

In the classical genre, branding is steeped in tradition, prestige, and formality. It draws heavily from historical visual codes, ornate serif fonts, monochromatic palettes, formalwear, and references to Western art history or architecture. Classical branding emphasizes discipline, skill, and cultural authority.

Evaluation 

The Classical genre experiment was by far the hardest to work with. Unlike the previous genres, which either aligned naturally with K-Pop’s visual playfulness or offered space for reinterpretation, Classical music belongs to a completely different aesthetic system. Translating that into a K-Pop context, where identity is bold, emotionally expressive, and fast-moving, was a challenge.

However, there was an unexpected point of cultural resonance: the fact that Korean pop culture is also deeply rooted in a society that is more conservative and hierarchical compared to many Western music industries. In that sense, Classical aesthetics, with their emphasis on discipline and tradition, felt slightly more at home than expected. There’s a cultural familiarity in the values it conveys: respect for elegance, and controlled emotion. This overlap added an interesting, if subtle, layer of fit.

Another difficulty was in the design language of classical music posters and album covers. They tend to be text-heavy, with a focus on composer names, titles, venues, and dates, rather than on visual branding or performer identity. This made it particularly hard to adapt the format to a K-Pop setting, where visuals usually speak louder than copy. Improvising around this structure was tricky, I had to either simplify the layout significantly or risk losing the clarity and energy expected of a K-Pop concept.

This experiment highlighted just how powerful cultural codes are in shaping genre identity, and how challenging it can be to bridge aesthetics built on fundamentally different assumptions.

Editing can have a huge impact on the overall mood of a picture. The before images look plain and “boring” compared to what I created in LR. Usually the goal of a “good” photographer would be to keep the editing minimal and making it look natural and not too fake, but here I wanted to go to the extemes. The lasercut glass, originally a tactile and light-reactive material, becomes a canvas for digital light manipulation.

Medium: Photography (of analogue designs, here Lasercut glass artworks) + Lightroom editing

Method: Extreme post-processing to reframe meaning, emotion, and visual identity, Material vs. Digital, Mood Creation vs. Documentation

The goal is not to make the image look “good,” but to push the visual mood to its extreme edge, breaking down the idea of photography as neutral or truthful. Here are my experiments with the previous lasercut designs on glass from experiment #4:

Structure of the Experiment:

Phase 1: Capture the Raw

• Photograph your lasercut glass designs in neutral lighting (daylight or studio).
• Use a consistent background and angle for control.

Phase 2: Create Mood Extremes in Lightroom

Create a series of radical edits, each based on an extreme manipulation of light

1. Overglow / Celestial Mood
   • Max out whites, clarity, and glow. Shift tones toward blue-violet.
   • Glass appears divine or untouchable like a starry night (see image above)

Using the gradient curve in an unusal way by inverting the colors, creating special effects with the otherwise translucent glass:

More experiments:

In a digital age, we rarely encounter anything unfiltered. By exaggerating the act of editing, this project lays bare the emotional manipulation inherent in visual culture. Not hiding the edits. I am weaponizing them and making them my own visual channel.

Video “Animation”

How do you design a poster that provokes in a subtle yet effective way? Rather abstract, direct, zoomed in, with bold taglines or just the photo itself?

The drafts above are a few examples of how I tried different ways of designing one of the posters. I knew that I wanted to leave the focus on the photo and mainly letting it speak for itself.

Generally, I think it’s really about balancing what you show and what you hold back, how much clarity you give and how much you leave open. There are so many ways to go about it.

You could use abstract visuals like shapes, colors, lines that hint at something without spelling it out, and therefore leaving space for people to interpret. Though, for this project I wanted to go bold and direct, with the striking photo that makes people stop and look. Zoomed-in details are super interesting too, focusing on textures, gestures, or small moments that pull you in closer.

Then there is Typography which can always make a huge difference in how posters are perceived. A strong tagline or bold text treatment can really push the vibe, adding something sharp, funny, or unexpected to the visual. Also, playing with scale, contrast, and negative space helps guide the eye and keeps things intentional, not messy. Colors matter too: muted tones can create a quiet tension, while bright contrasts make everything pop louder.

In my own work, I tried out a mix of these approaches. I also played with framing and composition, sometimes centering the subject, sometimes hiding parts, sometimes making it a bit awkward or staged on purpose.

At the end of the day, designing something provocative isn’t just about shocking people. It’s about creating a feeling, using design choices to challenge the viewer and make them react; maybe without even knowing why.

-> And I will maybe see that once I put the posters outside.

Conceptual Framework

Thermal paper is a paradox—designed to be instant, cheap, and disposable, yet it holds the traces of our most habitual activities: purchases, travel, appointments. This experiment turns thermal paper into a reflective surface for memory, authorship, and decay—writing with heat, not ink.

By scaling up receipts and inviting physical interaction (via heat), this work makes the invisible visible, and explores themes of data, consumption, and agency.

Thermal paper can mainly be found in receipts in our every day life.

Moodboard:

As I collected a pile of receipts I wanted to make them a larger format which is why i sewed them together to a >A2 poster. This “fabric of consumption” became my base canvas with the intent to turn throwaway records into an artifact worthy of scale and attention.

To make the experience interactive I brought my hair straightener to the FH and let our classmates interact and mess with my poster and this is how it turned out:

Documentation / Final Format

• I should photograph or scan the heat-marked surfaces before and after interaction.
• Mount the receipt poster behind a glass or frame
• Alternatively, film a time-lapse of the interaction: viewers burning, revealing, erasing.

A little side excursion about a very interesting talk I heard at the OFFF Festival in Barcelona.

Anna Ginsburg – a motion/graphic designer who inspired me through her approach of innovative and artsy aesthetics combined with important topics and insightful ideas.
This is what the internet says about her: Anna Ginsburg is a British director and animator known for her distinctive, hand-crafted style and her ability to combine bold visuals with powerful social messages. Her work often explores themes like gender, identity, and body image, using a mix of traditional animation, live action, and illustration. Ginsburg is especially celebrated for projects like Private Parts and Ugly, where she collaborates with other artists to create honest, thought-provoking stories that challenge stereotypes and open up conversations around complex topics.

Her Insta:
https://www.instagram.com/annaginsburg/?hl=de

Why was this talk so inspiring for me:

Anna Ginsburg’s talk was really inspiring to me, especially in the context of this semester, which is all about exploring. I often struggle with starting a project from scratch as I want to explore something meaningful and also stay true to my own style. Sometimes I’m unsure whether my way of working fits with serious or important topics. I often ask myself: is this too artsy to be taken seriously? Can something that looks a certain way still carry real meaning? Anna showed that it absolutely can. She talked about how her projects often deal with themes like gender, identity, and body image. And she does it not because someone asked her to, but because these topics are genuinely important to her. That really resonated with me. It reminded me that media and communication design don’t have to be distant or purely functional to fit a wish of clients who do not know anything about design anyways; they can be emotional, personal and driven by values.

I sometimes question the meaningfulness of this field, but her work showed me that creating awareness, encouraging conversation, and making space for underrepresented topics is incredibly relevant. It also made me think about collaboration in a new way — how working with others who share your beliefs and want to make a difference through creative work can be just as meaningful as the end result itself.

After choosing a few scenes that would portray the topic in a good way and get the message across, I lent a camera of a friend, asked Fiona and Angelo if they could model for me, and met up in the city. (Thank you !)

In this blogpost I would like to reflect on the process of taking the pictures as it is the perfect mirror of how you feel as a woman taking up the space in ways you normally don’t. For me, being the photographer it was probably not the same as being in front of the camera, but even I felt the slight discomfort of taking up this much space in public combined with the attention anxiety you get anyways when being outside with a camera.

This discomfort obviously speaks to something deeper: the internalized expectation that women should be small, quiet and unobtrusive in public spaces. Taking up space, whether physically by posing or creatively by directing a shoot, challenges that conditioning. The act of being visibly intentional in a space and claiming it without apology can feel transgressive, even when it’s something as simple as holding a camera or standing still for a portrait. It’s not just about the gaze of others but also about unlearning the instinct to minimize ourselves.

When I asked Fiona how she reflects on the photoshoot, she told me that it was definitely out of her comfort zone because the body language she had to show wasn’t usually hers, and ” it felt uncomfortable knowing people were watching. At first, I thought doing it in a public space like the main square might look cooler, but when it actually came to it, I realized how exposed and nervous I felt. We ended up doing it more hidden, and the photographer was really considerate throughout. Some poses, like in the tram, felt natural, but others like near the falafel shop or when I had to lower my pants made me feel embarrassed because it’s just not how I would normally behave in public. Overall, it really pushed me beyond what I’m usually comfortable with”.

Doing projects like this is really valuable for me and maybe others because they let us try out new ways of being seen and taking up space. It’s a chance to step outside of what feels normal or comfortable and see how that changes how we feel. I’m really curious to see what it will be like once the posters are hanging in public — how people might react, but also how I will feel seeing them there. Even now, the process has already made me think and feel differently, and I’m excited to see what happens next.

Concept Statement:

Transparent paper is not just a surface—it’s a metaphor. It can reveal, distort, conceal, or overlay. This experiment uses transparency to interrogate truth and illusion, age and memory, appearance and internal life, and how these concepts interact when layered both physically and conceptually.

Collecting ideas for meaningful messages matching the material:

• Transparent Poster
• Old vs. young age in layers
• Masking
• Facebook spying van (OFFF)
• Look Inside a Body
• Hidden brain structures
• Naked vs. Dressed

After this brainstorming I went online to collect inspiration and create a moodboard.

Objective

To explore how messages change in meaning depending on what is revealed, what is hidden, and what is layered—using transparent paper as a tool for storytelling.

Choice of Material

As I already collected bad experiences before with trying to print on transparent paper with a digital printer I was looking more into analogue techniques to process the material in an artistic way.

Here is a Typewriter design I created with transparent paper:

Final Format:

• Assemble into a zine, scroll, lightbox installation, or hanging mobile, just something that allows interaction with transparency.
• The piece could evolve as viewers shift, flip, or rearrange the transparent sheets to emphasizing the changeable, nonlinear nature of thought, identity, and perception.

Reflection:

The transparent paper doesn’t just support your content, it is the content. It forces you to rethink legibility, presence, and absence. This experiment shows how fragile, overlapping realities create depth, much like the inner life of a human being.