Yehwan Song wants to radically change how people think about the web

Let’s be honest, quite a lot of websites look the same these days don’t they? Heavily templated, minimalist, you probably know the deal. Much of this is based on a user-centric approach, focusing almost entirely on the easiest way for users to perform a task. This can be useful when transferring money to someone, but where is the fun in using it for almost everything else?

Yehwan Song strongly feels that the web should be more playful, and her mission is to make people know this, and hopefully, to see the light!

“People are trying to make websites more focused on being user friendly. Just making it easy to use, and as ‘good’ as possible,” she laments. “It’s kind of frustrating because they end up only using the same templates, meaning the user can only find where the button is and how to use it.” This oversimplification is something that Yehwan feels is selling people short, and turning the internet into a uniform place.

“If you think about good general graphic design, it’s more focused on the content, you know? Most posters and editorial designs are driven from the content, and utilise features that present that content in the best way,” she tells It’s Nice That. “I think that it’s kind of ignored in the web world, and technology especially, because people are more focused on technique and just making the user’s lives easy. I’m more focused on, ‘How can I make things more content-based?’”

Her interest in coding was something that she believes stems from her childhood: “I think there have been some points that triggered me. When I was young I loved playing and making small games and animations using Flash. My father also loved technology and devices, he was a real early adopter who loved collecting new devices and experimenting with them.”

Building on this initial introduction to technology and computing, Yehwan’s Eureka moment was something that confirmed this was a path she wanted to go down. It happened purely by chance, and almost didn’t happen at all: “When I was in school, I accidentally took a geometry and construction maths course, and I ended up being fascinated by the patterns and shapes made by these rules,” she says. “I was fascinated by the unexpected results and the aesthetics of it. From that one-month-class that I took just because I had nothing else to do, I started to think that I could actually use the computer as a tool to create something charming and interactive. It was from that point I started to love artists like Yugo Nakamura and Angelo Plessas.”

Yehwan’s work is not solely about coding though. Yes, it plays a huge role in her projects but there are also clear design influences at play. These aesthetic considerations stem from majoring in graphic design at University, which gave her a strong and varied base to build from. “The class was mostly focused on editorial design and printed things, typography etc,” she says.

She also makes use of the unique way that she learned code, which was by a steady immersion rather than any crash course. “I didn’t learn code from YouTube, or go somewhere to try and learn it,” she says. “I just naturally know it because I was in those environments and exposed to it when I was younger.”

Rather refreshingly, it is clear that Yehwan loves the media that she works in, and the metaphors that she uses to describe her relationship with it are examples of this. “Coding and website stuff is kind of like a friend or a creature – I don’t feel like it’s a code or a technology.” This perhaps explains Yehwan’s creative approach to coding, which is as far from formulaic as you can imagine. Her own website is a case in point, utilising Google Sheets to create a navigable Venn Diagram that plots her projects based on their involvement in certain categories.

In the grand scheme of Yehwan’s work though, this site is comparatively simple, with some of her most notable projects displaying information in extremely left-field ways. One of her particular favourites is her site for Open Recent: “It's an exhibition that shows Korean Graphic Design, I decided to make a website for it that captures itself every three seconds,” she says, beaming when recalling it. “That was a project that I really loved.”

The self-referential site constantly archives itself, tracking your movements and piling them up so you can sift through them as you go. Obviously it doesn’t need to do any of this, but where would be the fun in that? Which is the point that Yehwan is trying to get across – just because it doesn’t need this function, it doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t do it.

Another piece of work that she is extremely proud of is her work for the Typojanchi Biennale in 2018, which centres around how designers control tools to create their work. “For me, one of my main design tools is a web browser, so I focused on ‘responsive design,’” she tells us. When designers create a website, they make it responsive so that it adapts and does not lose it’s layout when the browser window size is changed – Yehwan chose to challenge this notion.

“I created the same website 252 times, each with different ‘responsiveness.’ Some of them were not fully responsive, some were 100 per cent responsive and some were not responsive at all. I sliced each of the 252 websites into pieces and put each piece together, so in a certain ratio the website looks like a normal website, but if you change the ratio it looks scattered because each piece has different responsiveness rules,” she says.

With a background in coding, Yehwan is no stranger to complex data and algorithms, which is quite a unique position to be in in the creative industry. Much of her work uses data sets to create unpredictable and exciting ways of presenting solutions and carrying out commands.

How we manage and what we do with data is one of the most important issues facing society at the moment, and is often spoken of as something we must be wary of. It is therefore refreshing that Yehwan continues to approach it with an open mind, hoping to use it in a positive way. “It is fascinating because data these days is generative and unexpected,” she tells us. “There are giant databases that we can neither fully understand nor control, which means it always involves unexpectedness and surprise.”

Spotify Design is proud to sponsor It’s Nice That’s Ones to Watch 2020, championing a diverse and inclusive creative community. We’re a team of cross-disciplinary creatives who love to design experiences that make meaningful connections between listeners and artists. We’re committed to designing for tomorrow and to supporting future-facing creatives who are out to make an impact on the world.