Hailey Lee

Frameworks

Put on a pair of glasses. What do you see? People? Trees? Cars? Buildings? Now focus on the glasses themselves.  Can you see the frame? Why is it that you don't notice it until now?

Glasses make the world feel clearer, sharper, more accurate. But what you're seeing is always a view inside a frame. The glasses give you a frame, and show you the world through it. Once you get used to that frame, you forget that everything you see is already inside one. Most of us forget that the frame of our glasses is always there—at the edge of everything we look at. But now that I've pointed it out, you can't unsee it.

Frameworks explores how, as a graphic designer, I create conditions for audiences to recognize the frames through which they see the world—and to become comfortable with the discomfort of having no solid ground beneath them.

Point of View

This series of three 24×36" posters is legible only under RGB light. Each overlays three images and texts in cyan, magenta, and yellow, addressing Korean historical events—the Sewol ferry disaster and the Gwangju Uprising. Under natural light, the layers collapse into illegibility.

We treat visual and historical information as fact, but the frame shaping it stays invisible. The RGB mechanism exposes this: red light surfaces one focal point while others vanish—not because they're absent, but because light determines what can be seen.

The Sewol poster splits one reality into Power (Park Geun-hye's response), Voice (public protest), and Truth (the sinking itself). The Gwangju poster offers Freedom (Chun Doo-hwan's censorship), Authority (military violence), and Justice (citizen resistance). None is sufficient alone.

The posters don't give answers; they stage a situation for asking. Moving between lights, viewers choose a frame and notice what disappears. What no light fully reveals is the point.

There is no such thing as Red

Do we truly see the same colors?

Drawing on the theory of qualia, this project explores subjective experience as personal, unverifiable, and only appearing shared through language. An online survey asked participants to describe their impressions of red, green, and blue through memories, sensations, and images.

The responses revealed two patterns: people sometimes feel the same thing when looking at different colors, and sometimes feel entirely different things when looking at the same one.

The resulting book follows these moments of resonance. Each page begins with impressions of red, shifting to green or blue whenever different colors share the same word or feeling. Individual experiences form a single sequence that connects colors we usually treat as separate.

Ultimately, the project suggests that the boundaries between red, green, and blue may be less inherent to perception than to language—that our small, private worlds remain distinct, yet touch in unexpected ways.

Only Real Talk Here

"How are you?" How many times did you say it today? And how many times did you actually mean it?

The ease of the phrase is itself a frame. The expected answer is "fine"—not an honest account. Responding truthfully disrupts the exchange. We say it without expecting an answer; we answer it without telling the truth.

This project explores how psychological and physical distance shape genuine conversation. It consists of two chairs and a set of accordion booklets with prompts that vary by proximity. Four versions exist—for friends, partners, mother and daughter, and siblings.

When participants sit far apart, they encounter surface prompts like "Ask about summer plans." Sitting closer reveals more intimate questions, placed under the seat and along the chair's edges. The booklet works the same way: held at both ends, it draws participants physically closer with each page.

So, how have you been lately?

Verify You are Human

AI's efficiency over humans is treated as fact: faster, more accurate. But this comparison emerges within a specific frame that defines value through productivity, reducing both humans and AI to units of labor. Within it, humans can only appear inferior.

This project borrows the format of reCAPTCHA—but instead of verifying you are human through efficiency, it asks: Verify you are an organism. Verify you are emotional. Verify you are laborious.

On the website, participants complete image puzzles in each section. AI-generated tiles sit beneath: a portrait with cell imagery, typeset text with handwritten letters. In the final section, participants trace previous results by hand. The repetitive act becomes proof itself.

Human hands aren't precise. Tiles overlap, pile up. The result is printed on organza—a crooked trace of human participation. Layered over the AI image, the mess shows through.

Step outside the frame. We are organisms. That imperfection is the point.

In Free Fall

Hito Steyerl's In Free Fall says something radical: the horizon isn't a natural reference point but a line humans invented to impose order. "Falling" only makes sense if we presuppose ground. The frameworks we use to make sense of the world are constructs, not givens.

But the essay itself is formatted like any academic text. The argument is radical; the form is not. That gap is where this project begins.

This project re-edits the eight pages of In Free Fall by treating text as image first. Margins and text positions are swapped—same words, different page. Each text box is rotated at an arbitrary angle, forcing viewers to turn the paper or tilt their heads to read. Pages are bound by a single punch through the center, so every page rotates freely. Order and direction are never fixed.

What Steyerl says in language, this book says in form.

Decoding NeuroVisio Language

A universal communication method for all life forms in the future, the “Neurovisio Language”, has been developed. This language interacts with its audience, conveying messages through light waves and patterns.The typeface is designed based on the forms of cells, the fundamental units of all lifeforms, and each video responds to trees, animals, and other living beings.“Decoding Neurovisio Language” translates this visual language into a format aligned with contemporary human linguistic systems, making it accessible for modern comprehension.

AnthropoMorph

'Think of an ant—head, thorax, abdomen at roughly 30%, 20%, 50% of its body.Think of an ant—head, thorax, abdomen at roughly 30%, 20%, 50% of its body. Now imagine a human built the same way. At six feet tall, the lower body would be three feet long. We'd have to crawl. Every door, handle, and surface would look completely different.

Vitruvius argued that human proportion was the standard of perfect harmony, and that architecture should follow it. But how did one man's theory shape an entire tradition? Through power and access. The standard wasn't neutral—bodies that didn't match were erased by omission.

This project relocates the frame. It asks what harmony looks like from the perspective of an ant, a squid, a giraffe, an owl—morphing the Pantheon, Ionic columns, chairs, houses, and phones according to other species' proportions. Each page includes a QR code to an AR environment where readers can place full-scale 3D versions into their own space.

Formality as Deception

We read people every day. The first thing we read is what they wear.

Clothing is information. A suit makes someone neat, trustworthy, professional—judgment happens before we register it. Formal dress provides information to be read in place of the individual. The suit becomes the person. The suit is, in itself, a frame.

This project dismantles formality. A shirt—the most basic component of a suit—was constructed with each pattern piece cut to follow the shape of the word DECEPTION. Black fabric forms the letter frame; white fabric fills the negative space. The seams are held together by magnets. From outside, it looks like a complete shirt.

In performance, as the body moves, the white pieces fall away one by one—until only the black letter frame remains: DECEPTION.

Afterward, the shirt is handed to the audience. The magnetic pieces can be reassembled, producing a different result for each person.