ShinYoung is a Korean real-estate developer. The last few years, the company has been expanding from a mere, mainstream apartment building developer, to an all-round realty manager. Of course, residential apartment buildings in densely populated Korea remain vital to the organisation, but the development of commercial real estate (shopping malls, cinemas, office buildings) and real estate for the upper class have become serious markets for Shin Young. To match the company’s identity with the new vision, a new Corporate Design programme had to be developed.
Not by Total ldentity, however. Shin Young chose a local company in Seoul to develop their Corporate Identity. An impressive manual was the result. Within weeks after this company finished their project for Shin Young, Total identity was called in. Just to evaluate the new design and deliver some comment on the newly developed style.

The briefing contained  a number of key values of both Shin Young and GWell that were derived from the research and information phase: trustworthy, promising, creative and ‘home’. First step would be to come up with a visual and verbal concept, that would fit the briefing, and use that concept in a design direction. The first presentation showed a total of eight possible design directions. Shin Young’s comment seemed to indicate a strong focus on home, trust and a safe and secure feeling. It was therefore that the second presentation had two major concepts: from Shin Young’s comment resulted ‘home, safety, trust’ but Total Identity had yet conceived another interesting concept ‘growing and blossoming’. The two concepts were visualized in four design candidates.
This presentation proved to be crucial. The ‘growing and blossoming’ concept, the examples, the metaphor of growing plants and building buildings and the visualization of this concept in strong, outspoken symbols and typography lead to a standing ovation by Shin Young. ‘Growing and blossoming’ was the ideal concept for the product and service of Shin Young and GWell. This was the concept that the Corporate Design should follow.

The designs of the symbols of Shin Young and GWell represent a seed that is sprouting and a flower that eventually grows from the seed. For GWell estates an even richer, more luxurious flower has been pictured. The typography of the company names is of course completely custom made, to match the style of the symbols. Note the choice of capital first letters in ShinYoung (now without
a space!) and the fully lower case ‘gwell’, to match the slightly more corporate ShinYoung and the rather open, friendly character of GWell (it was decided that only the logotype was to be in lower case letters: in ‘normal’ texts, the name GWell would be spelled as shown in this sentence).
The symbol for GWell has been placed between the ‘g’ and ‘well’. This was done to prevent mispronounciation of the brand name, in a country where English remains a ‘foreign language’ and our Latin script is as difficult to read as is Korean hangul to Europeans. This is a special point of attention when designing for audiences that are not used to reading Latin script.
In order to create some more design ingredients, a illustrative or 4th element (trademark, color and type being the first three) was developed for all brands. A variation of diagonal striping, adorned with the corporate symbol and using the appropriate corporate colors, can be used in may ways, in many dimensions and color situations and on every possible application.

Making the new design communicate, requires implementation. In order to provide the local agencies and production companies with an idea of the style and expression of the Corporate Design, Total Identity designed a large number of ‘Look & Feel’ examples. This kind of designs is not intended to provide minute instruction as to how each item is to be designed, but is a representation of the right way to use the Corporate Design of ShinYoung and GWell. It should be used as a source of inspiration and information for any designer who will be working for ShinYoung in the future.

For more information please contact Hans P Brandt:

hpbrandt@totalidentity.nl