Education is about individual development of skills, knowledge and understanding. It is also about social mobilization and distribution of resources and population. Off-White Paper, conceived as a “visual reader”, focuses on the latter.

Since 1964, the Brno Biennial has showcased excellency in graphic design from all around the world. We were interested in finding out the educational background of the recognized excellency. Taking the accepted exhibitors from the last five editions of the Brno Biennial as a starting point, we performed a simple quantitative research into their educational profiles. What countries did they study, and what schools did they go? What are the economic realities of the frequently represented countries and schools? How many students are accepted in the programs each year, and how many graduate? How much do they have to pay for their education? Are there any meaningful correlations between any of the facts?

Here, we were mostly interested in quantities, not qualities. We acted as heartless number crunchers, trying to find out—and communicate—some fundamental facts about graphic design education as (selectively) manifested at the Brno Biennial during the last decade. Following the tradition of the Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education), the book and the accompanying exhibition are mainly comprised of a series of pictorial charts.

Edited and designed by Sulki & Min Choi (KR)Sulki & Min are Seoul-based graphic designers. Sulki Choi studied communication design at Chungang University, Korea, and Min Choi at Seoul National University, Korea. Both earned their MFA degrees in graphic design at Yale University, New Haven, US. They worked as researchers in design at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, the Netherlands, from 2003 until 2005. Since they came back to Seoul, Sulki & Min have worked mainly in cultural area, collaborating with institutions and individuals for the design of graphic identities, marketing materials and publications. In 2006, they held their first exclusive exhibition at the Gallery Factory in Seoul, for which they received the Art Award of the Year from the Arts Council Korea. They have participated in many exhibitions at institutions including Frankfurter Kunstverein, Moravian Gallery in Brno, Ningbo Graphic Design Biennale, Anyang Public Art Project, Arko Art Center, Platform Seoul, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco and Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. They also make and publish books through their own Specter Press, often collaborating with contemporary Korean artists and writers. Sulki & Min worked as graphic designers for the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a collaborative project initiated by the Guggenheim Foundation and BMW, during its three-year operation in New York, Berlin and Mumbai, for which they created an interactive graphic identity system based on on-line participation. In 2013, Min Choi curated Typojanchi, an international biennial of typography in Seoul, as the curatorial director. Both Sulki Choi and Min Choi teach graphic design and typography, at Kaywon School of Art & Design and the University of Seoul, respectively.

This publication was commissioned in the form of an assignment, given by the curators of the 26th Brno Biennial 2014.