Lights of Seoul
Overview
Lights on the Water, Where We Become One.
Lights of Seoul is a lantern festival held on Toronto Island that reinterprets Korean cultural traditions within a Canadian context. Through radiant lantern artworks, the festival transforms light into a shared cultural experience—inviting visitors into a collective space of celebration, reflection, and connection.
Year
October - December 2025
Duration
12 Weeks
Type
Branding
Role
- Branding Designer
Tools Used
- Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe InDesign
What if Korea’s cultural festival became a multicultural festival held in Canada? I developed a festival brand that blends Korea’s Festival into a multicultural environment, called Seoulight, celebrating Korean culture, authenticity, and diverse cultural experiences in Toronto.
Challenges
Korea’s Seoul Lantern Festival is an annual winter festival in South Korea, inspired by lantern traditions
historically associated with Buddhism. It symbolizes wishes, unity, and gathering with family through lantern displays
along the water. Celebrating this festival in the end of every year, people wishes their health, success, and lucks for the next year.
In order to transfer this cultural festival to Toronto, Canada and integrate it within a multicultural environment,
it was important to understand cultural differences and acceptance between Eastern and Western audiences.
To reduce hesitation from participants, the experience needed to focus on the activity itself
rather than forcing cultural understanding. Instead of asking people to actively adapt to the culture,
the goal was to create a place where people could naturally come together and connect.
Approach & Key Process
Original Festival Reference
Target Audiences
Cultural Translation
Visual Culture Research
Synthesizing
Visitors' Experiences
Core Element Selection
Concept Development
System Construction
Content Strategy
Prototyping
Mockup & System Finalization
Feedback & Iteration
Final Showcase
Solution
At the start of the project, I focused on the core activity of floating lanterns on the water and its symbolic meaning
of wishing for luck, unity, and togetherness, rather than emphasizing the festival’s origin. Because the ultimate goal was
to naturally blend Korean cultural festival into a multicultural environment, the focus shifted from the festival's orgin to the actiivty and its meaning.
However, the visual identity importantly references Korea by consistently using a structured colour palette of red and blue,
derived from the Korean flag. The overall design language remains minimal and sophisticated, reflecting the calm
atmosphere created by lantern light while emphasizing lanterns as the central visual element of the festival.
Message
We become one.
The central festival activity is customizing paper lanterns and floating them on the water with wishes for the coming year. As the lanterns drift and gather together on the water, they symbolically represent people becoming one. As the lanterns float across the water and illuminate the night, participants not only experience a Korean tradition but also connect with one another. In this way, the festival becomes a gathering place where people from different backgrounds come together, and individual wishes gain shared meaning.
2026's Selected Case Study
