Tactile, wobbly and familiar: Sohee Chae's designs are both experimental and methodical

When Sohee Chae first arrived in London to study for her MA in Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art, she made a rule for herself: always ask one question after a lecture, and reach out to at least one designer she wanted to talk to. "It was really about practising bravery in small ways," she says. "Through these efforts, I met people who welcomed me warmly, and I also encountered unexpected opportunities – being invited to studios I admired, receiving collaboration proposals or getting meaningful advice."

Sohee grew up and studied in Korea, completing a degree in Visual Design with a focus on service and brand design before taking a gap year to work as a brand designer in Seoul. The training was rigorous and structured. "I was largely trained to anticipate defined outcomes and design processes accordingly, with a strong emphasis on entering and adapting to industry quickly." Over time, she noticed something. "My perspective was increasingly shaped by rules and expectations rather than intuition." That realisation eventually brought her to London and the RCA, where she began to reconsider the outcomes of her work and her entire attitude towards making. "Now, I see design more as a matter of process and mindset than purely of results."

This change is explicit in everything she has made since. Her RCA graduation project, Letting Go in the Cycle, is an experimental publication and tool that explores what she calls the small "gaps" within systems – the overlooked spaces that "reactivate visual and tactile perception". The work is methodical and radical, with precise grids interrupted by hand-crafted elements, and structured layouts that invite the reader to slow down and feel the page.

The Shape of Change pushes this further by incorporating a typographic experiment using shibori dyeing – a Japanese resist-dyeing technique – to visualise chance within controlled systems. The dye bleeds and pools within structures that Sohee has set up, the outcome never fully predictable. "Graphic design today increasingly leaves room for interpretation and personal engagement," she says, "which I see as an important shift."

Her branding work operates with the same sensibility, as is the case for Second Skin – a fashion brand identity that reframes scars and marks as symbols of individuality. Sohee worked with experimental materials and typography to find a visual language that represented that idea, and the result is bubbly, tactile, wobbly and familiar. 

Since graduating, Sohee has been building on two tracks simultaneously. As a brand and graphic designer at Seoul-based branding studio Project Room, she focuses on identity work rooted in the intimate narratives of small brands. Alongside this, she has soft-launched her own independent creative studio, Layer/Ply, operating between Seoul and London, where she pursues more experiential, research-based graphic work and cross-disciplinary collaborations. A recent show, Open Studio/Prototype, held in collaboration with Human-AI Dynamics Lab, Lovelace, and New Media Art & Tech Studio, brought an audience together around the theme of prototyping – sharing ongoing works and studio manifestos, with future editions already planned.

With lots of exciting projects on the horizon, it's important for anyone (at all levels) to look back and have a moment of reflection – and in Sohee's case, it's clear that there are two cities and two modes that have been threading throughout her entire practice. "Seoul brings to mind speed, perfection and polish," she explains. "London feels driven by originality, personal values and warmth. There's strong respect for ideas, dialogue and individual perspectives, which has helped me feel my own voice being recognised. I believe combining the strengths of both environments can lead to a particularly strong design practice."