"Core Engine," a work by Kwon Jung-ryun, a student in the Design Department at Seoul National University's College of Fine Arts, has won first place in the "Seoul Forum 2026 Key Visual Design Contest" hosted by Seoul Economic Daily.
Seoul Economic Daily announced on the 5th that it has selected Kwon's work "Core Engine" as the official key visual for Seoul Forum 2026, and will use it in major online and offline promotional materials, event venues, and digital content.
The contest was organized to discover an official image that visually represents the theme of Seoul Forum 2026, "New Core, New Industry," which opens on the 27th of this month.
Applications were accepted in two categories: "Category A," which utilizes the existing "Seoul Forum 2025" design, and "Category B," which allows free design. Core Engine was submitted in Category A. "I sought to inherit part of the blue-based technological imagery of the existing Seoul Forum key visual while developing it into a more structural and expanded graphic language," Kwon said. "I expressed the flow of artificial intelligence (AI) spreading as a new driving force across industries through a central light point, curved flows, and wave-form line structures."
Kwon's work Core Engine received high marks from the judges for its design quality as well as its incorporation of the Seoul Forum's initial. One judge explained, "We gave high marks for symbolically reflecting the 'S' initial of Seoul Forum and for the natural harmony of various design elements."
Second place went to "Field of the New Core" by Hwang Seo-yeon and Bae Min-ju of Kookmin University's AI Design Department. The work depicts how AI, as a new central magnetic field, is reshaping the order of industries overall. The excellence award in Category B was given to Lee Hyun-bin, a student at the School of Design Convergence at Hongik University.
A notable feature of this contest was that it permitted the use of AI tools in the creative process. When AI tools were used, participants were required to submit the model name used and key prompts. However, under the principle that the final submission must be a creative work directly planned and controlled by the participant, works simply auto-generated by AI were excluded from consideration.
