Awarded Platinum in Graphis Poster Awards 2026, Byoung-il Sun’s poster practice sits at the intersection of human sensitivity and conceptual clarity, where visual storytelling becomes a vehicle for reflection rather than decoration. Across works such as Consideration and Sea Music Festival, Sun uses metaphor, material choice, and disciplined composition to address urgent cultural themes, from the ethics of AI to environmental responsibility, guiding the viewer into a deeper dialogue with the image and its meaning.

Case Study by Byoung-il Sun

Consideration

The Consideration poster stems from the idea that AI design—a key aspect of our time—needs to be more humane. While the AI design we actively utilize leverages big data to offer rapid processing and diverse methods, my concern is whether it truly embodies human nature. In other words, it is not a creative idea conceived by a human mind, but rather a sum total of data generated by data.

Therefore, I wanted to explore the emotional need to portray AI with a human touch. By wrapping the AI’s face in a warm scarf, symbolizing warmth, the poster conveys the message that AI design needs human warmth and a sensibility that captures human emotions. When will AI experts and engineers consider this evolution?

Creative Process

I began by sketching the idea and considering how to materialize it. The image expression strategy naturally became photography, utilizing photographic imagery. When creating the artwork, two separate photos—the AI robot and the scarf—needed to be composited, so I focused on capturing various angles to achieve a natural and detailed expression. The overall layout places the image large and centered to draw the viewer’s eye, with typography positioned above and below.

Sea Music Festival

The Sea Music Festival poster was created for a performance held at sea. While the poster advertises the event, its underlying concept is to metaphorically express the beauty of ocean ecology. As we know, many environmental problems occurring in the sea originate from human actions; nature itself rarely causes such issues. Therefore, through this poster, I aimed to draw attention to ecological concerns by highlighting the beauty of our oceans.

Although the poster’s surface content promotes the Sea Music Festival, it also conveys the message that we must share and care for the beauty of the sea—something we must preserve and coexist with—through music. The poster is completed by harmoniously composing various sea creatures within a musical score expressed as ocean waves, overlaying a clear and pristine image that connects both music and the sea.

Creative Process

The primary focus of this poster was the central expression of ocean waves and piano keys. To achieve effective image layering, the waves were rendered using a mesh fabric texture, while the piano keys were arranged as two wide images to form the background of the poster.

Next, fish images were positioned between the waves and piano keys, with their size and placement carefully adjusted for maximum visual impact. Typography was also a priority, with all uppercase letters placed neatly beneath the piano keys.

About Byoung-il Sun

Byoung il- Sun was Born in Korea in 1958. Since 1995, he has been a professor of Visual
Information Design at Namseoul University. He is currently an honorary professor Emeritus
at this university, supervising master's and doctoral students in their class and thesis
research. He won a number of international design awards. And over the years he has
served in numerous international design juries, academic chairs. President, BIPB Poster
Biennale.

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