Lookbook: Word Cup

Facebook communication designer and football fanatic Ji Lee creates a league of his own with his Word Cup challenge.
We've been following Facebook communications designer and football fan Ji Lee's fun "Word as Image" commentary on Twitter with great delight. In today's Lookbook we share some of our favourites. 
 
Lee started the "Word as Image" project as an assignment for a typography class at art school some 16 years ago.
 
"I loved 'cracking' the challenge of visualising the meaning behind words using only the graphic elements contained in the words. It’s easy to come up with visual solutions for words like 'jump', 'fall', 'short', etc. I wanted to take the challenge to a much higher level by trying to come up with more challenging solutions. Since then it become an obsession. It became my insomnia project," he says. 
 
After about 15 years of doing this, he collected about 100 words and published a Word as Image book as well as an animated version for iPad that incorporates sound. 
 
The FIFA World Cup sparked an idea to report the event through his own "Word Cup": "The whole world is watching the games and sharing their thoughts on social networks. It all started when Spain was shockingly knocked out and I wrote the word sPAIN on my Facebook account. A lot of people liked this, so I decided to take this as a challenge."
 

Lee, who grew up in Brazil, is a big soccer fan. "My favorite teams by order: Brazil, Korea (I was born in Korea), USA (because I’ve been living in the US for more than 20 years). Then I root for underdogs."  

Watch the Talk with Ji Lee