After three weeks in southern South Korea, I can vouch that Korean culture is rich with visual communication, design and promotion. Every city here has a brand, like “Charm Jinju” or “Sparkling Hadong.”

Many restaurant facades bear a cartoon depicting the main dish served, like a perky eel or cute cow.

Even bathroom doors have creative signage.

On the natural side, the mountainous Korean terrain inspires a terraced pattern for landscape architecture.

Ancient designs can pack the biggest wallop. The eaves of Buddhist temples are decorated with exquisite detail and color.

We all need dragons guarding our doors.

Filed under: Art, Design, Travel

As hard as it is to believe, I have taken a whole 5 days in a row off! I am a notorious workaholic, so it is quite a miracle for me to voluntarily stay away for such a long stretch with no associated holiday in the immediate proximity.

But here I am, typing my post from home while watching the latest re-run of Family Guy. Two of my fellow nuggeteers are also out of the office at the SXSW conference in Austin.

I hope we all get an update tomorrow from Daniel’s next post. By the way, have you noticed a pattern yet? We have taken to blogging more regularly so that all of our dedicated readers can wait excitedly for their favorite IMA author’s post.

Back to the business at hand…On a tip from Noelle, I am working up a post centered around an article in the most recent Wired magazine, but in my mini-vacay state-of-mind I would prefer to keep this one more casual. So look for that next week.

This week I am looking for some perspective and spending some time selfishly trying on shoes and other similarly indulgent endeavors like surfing the web.

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Filed under: Musings, New Media