Design in Focus
The Scope of Work Included :
Series Concept & Co-Founding — Editorial Direction — Series Brand Identity — Art Direction — Interview Production & Curation
Design in Focus is an ongoing editorial series co-founded by STNMTL and Branding in Asia, one of the region's leading voices on branding, design, and creative culture. Each edition turns its lens on a single nation, examining how design operates there not as ornament, but as infrastructure: woven into industrial policy, export strategy, and cultural identity.
Our relationship with the platform runs deep. Working closely with Founder & Editor-in-chief Bobby McGill, we designed the Branding in Asia identity in 2016, and the Design in Focus system was built as a branch of that original architecture: the parent brand's typographic voice and structural DNA carried forward, then opened up so each national edition could take on the script, colour palette, and pattern language of the country it celebrates. One family, many accents.
The Korean edition speaks in Hangul geometry, the Thai edition in woven script and silk-pattern repetition, the Indian edition in lotus and rangoli. Each is unmistakably itself, and unmistakably part of the same house.
Design coverage celebrates studios, campaigns, and awards, but rarely steps back to ask how an entire country builds its design capability. We set out to tell that story, nation by nation, and to give each edition an identity built from that nation's own visual language.
Korean Design in Focus
The series began in Seoul. STNMTL founder Ibraheem Youssef sat down with Sang Mook Rhee, Director of the Management Division at the Seoul Design Foundation, inside Zaha Hadid's Dongdaemun Design Plaza. That two-part conversation, Designing Tomorrow, Part 1 and Part 2, traced how a nation with few natural resources made design its industrial strategy, starting with playgrounds, urban lighting, and shop signage, and building toward the DDP itself.
It became the founding piece that inspired Design in Focus, and South Korea the natural choice for its first edition. The wider edition grew into a full portrait of Korean design, with conversations spanning Jeong Hoon Lee of JOHO Architecture, graphic designer Jin Jung, and a tribute to Ahn Sang-soo's revolutionary Hangul typography. The KDIF identity we designed carries its own layers. At first glance, the KDIF logo might seem like just another set of stylized letters. But much like Korea itself, there’s depth beneath the surface that rewards the curious observer.
The wordmark featuring “Korean 한국 Design 디자인“ embodies a bold, minimalist approach that reveals layers of thoughtful design: The red and blue palette references the South Korean flag without overt nationalism, and the wordmark sets Hangul characters in a blocky, geometric style honouring the alphabet's square composition, built on the DS Ddungsang Variable typeface by Seoul's Yoon Design Group. Tradition and innovation, holding the same line.
Thai Design in Focus
The Thai edition ran as a two-week daily journey through one of Asia's warmest and most distinctive design cultures: more than thirty features spanning graphic design, architecture, typography, textiles, furniture, and product design. Conversations ranged from Bangkok studios like Farmgroup, ADHOCK Studio, and Shake & Bake to architects at Openbox, ASWA, and Architectkidd; from type director Smich Smanloh of Cadson Demak on the balance between tradition and innovation in Thai typography, to the handwoven textiles of Ausara Surface and Kachama K. Perez.
Alongside the interviews, the edition explored Thai design at the institutional scale: the Thai Airways identity, the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, and how Thai malls redefined experiential retail. A portrait emerged of a design culture that carries, as one designer put it, an innate warmth and vitality.
The TDIF identity draws from two of Thailand's deepest visual wells: its script and its textiles. The wordmark sets the Thai title in SOV Rohan, a low-slung, wide-set typeface by Thai type designer Worawut Thanawatanawanich, released freely through Thailand's f0nt.com community and chosen for its minimal strokes and the playful character of its letterforms. Crowning it is a traditional Thai floral motif in vivid magenta, a nod to the ornamental lai Thai tradition of temple gilding and craftwork. Where the mark becomes a pattern, the identity shifts registers: wordmark and floral diamonds interlock in repeating rows of yellow, magenta, and purple against black, echoing the geometry of Thai silk weaving, where meaning is carried in repetition. Tradition as texture, identity as fabric.
Indian Design in Focus
The Indian edition ran over two weeks in November 2025, exploring a design culture defined not by a single aesthetic but by what one featured designer called a spectrum of expressions. The series gathered conversations with leading voices across branding, architecture, interiors, fashion, and product design:
Anthony Lopez of Lopez Design on why Indian design is layered, adaptive, and alive; Ashwini Deshpande of Elephant Design on bold design as strategic necessity; Roshni Kavina, National Creative Director at Saatchi & Saatchi India, on heritage as pride; Neha Tulsian of NH1 Design on blending curiosity with strategy; and architects from STHAPATI, The Purple Ink Studio, and Gaurav Roy Choudhury Architects, among more than thirty features. Alongside the interviews, essays like The Logic of More traced the evolution of Indian maximalism, a design language that values density over emptiness and storytelling over stillness.
The IDIF identity embraces that maximalism on its own terms. At its heart is the lotus, rendered as a flat geometric mark and repeated in three rotating colorways so that no single version is the logo; the multiplicity is the point. The palette, titled Contemporary India, pairs indigo blue and marigold with vibrant pink and mint green, colours pulled from the everyday Indian streetscape as much as from festival tradition. In pattern form, the lotus multiplies into ordered rows bordered by vine motifs, echoing the logic of block-printed textiles, and gathers into a full rangoli-style medallion, the radial geometry drawn at thresholds during Diwali, the season in which the edition launched. Abundance, but with a system underneath it.
Across every edition, our role spans the conceptual and the crafted: co-developing the series format and editorial voice with Branding in Asia, designing each nation's visual identity with an utmost respect for local & cultural nuances, all while shaping how each story is framed for an international audience of designers, brand leaders, and policymakers.
Design in Focus continues, each edition asking the same question of a new nation: what happens when a country decides that design matters?