This book is a collection of the text in GRAPHIC throughout 5 years since 2007 to 2011. Texts contains 422 interviews, 31 essays, and 160 designer’s comments with regards to contemporary issues in graphic design. This book is a compilation of writings from 20 issues of GRAPHIC released over a five-year period between 2007 and 2011. Since the text in GRAPHIC mainly consists of interviews with graphic designers, most of the words collected in its pages come directly from the mouths of the designers themselves. In that sense, it is a collection of thoughts from the people our magazine spoke to over those five years.

Since its beginnings, GRAPHIC has adopted a one-topic-per-issue format, with themes coming from all different areas of endeavor and interest. Some have been more informative in nature, others more abstract, still others more archival. The magazine has also been undergoing a gradual transformation into an exploration of international visual culture – a change that dates back to 2009, when its two-language format (English and Korean) was introduced. The all-Korean issues and the bilingual have had rather different focuses. If there is one common thread running through all the issues, it is the effort to highlight the graphic design process and mind-set by focusing on the independent approaches of its practitioners.

Our main interest has been in the ways contemporary graphic design has been branching out, with each issue dedicated to figuring out how to record these changes. What sources do we look to for the energy that drives new currents in graphic design? In our case, we identified them in terms of two major themes in graphic design: “independence” and “expansion.” These are the links that join the different topics found in each issue. By distilling 20 issues of GRAPHIC into a single volume, we hope to make the individual meaning of each of them clearer, and to help the reader gain a general perspective on today’s graphic design “scene.” None of these issues was easy to make. Despite all our efforts, there have been frequent editing mistakes and translation errors. Another reason for publishing this book is to fix those errors and present a more polished and complete text.