A Passion for Asia: John Lee and Jiae Kim’s THEME Magazine
While some people are analysts, some people simply get things done. John Lee and Jiae Kim are most definitely of the latter kind.
After living in several countries, Lee, 37, and Kim, 34, founders, co-editors and creative directors of
THEME - a quarterly magazine for an international readership, covering Asian culture from a different angle than heretofore seen - found Asian stories to be the most compelling.
Kim and Lee’s ideas are driven by instinct and curiosity: “we assume that if we’re interested in a subject, our readers will be too.” The result: a stylishly designed magazine with state-of-the-art photography and a very personal tone. They work with a top-notch, but unbelievably small team of writers, photographers and artists, presenting relevant and little-discussed phenomena to a well-educated and extensively travelled audience. “We stay away from stories that are being told over and over again.”
Their background helps to bring a diverse selection of stories to the table for discussion. They met in 1996 in Seoul and got married in Tokyo in 1997. When Lee was a creative director at Equinox, and Kim was an art director at Pentagram, they felt that they were getting too comfortable with the paths of their careers and decided to take a risk. By now resident in NYC, they started collecting stories for their first issue of THEME in September of 2004 and launched it 4 months later. From the very beginning THEME received distribution in top bookstores and won the Society of Publication Designers’ Design Award as well as
PRINT magazine's Design Award.
As if this wasn’t enough of a life-task, they also do consulting, art directing, and design for companies like Doo.Ri, Diane von Fürstenberg, and Nike. And they keep thinking about doing another magazine. Makes me wonder if these two don’t secretly have clones that are accomplishing some of their many tasks for them …
Link:http://www.THEMEmagazine.com
