Building a cultural survival guide for life in South Korea
The Nunchi Guide
The Nunchi Guide is a digital platform focused on helping foreigners better understand Korean culture, social norms, and unspoken communication. The project centered around creating a modern, approachable website that explains everyday Korean behaviors, mindsets, and cultural differences through engaging articles, visuals, and storytelling.
Client
The Nunchi Guide
Link to Website
Industry
Blog
Design Tool
Figma
No-Code Dev Tool
Framer
Many foreigners living in or visiting South Korea struggle to understand the unspoken social rules that shape everyday life. Concepts like 눈치 (nunchi), hierarchy, indirect communication, dining etiquette, and group harmony are rarely explained clearly, despite being deeply embedded in Korean society. Most existing resources felt either overly academic, outdated, or difficult to relate to for younger international audiences. There was a lack of visually modern, easy-to-understand content that explained Korean culture through practical, real-life situations people actually experience. In addition, the platform needed to organize a wide range of topics—from food etiquette and workplace culture to relationships and social psychology—without overwhelming users.
The biggest challenge was transforming nuanced cultural concepts into content that felt engaging, digestible, and visually approachable without oversimplifying Korean culture itself. The site needed to balance: educational depth with entertainment modern visual storytelling with readability humor with cultural sensitivity structured navigation with exploratory browsing Another key challenge was creating a scalable content system that allowed articles, categories, and featured topics to grow naturally over time while maintaining a cohesive brand identity.
I designed the platform in Figma with a strong focus on clean typography, visual storytelling, and mobile-first readability. The UX was structured around how users naturally explore culture online—through relatable scenarios, curiosity-driven article titles, and highly visual category sections. The website was organized into clear cultural themes such as dining etiquette, relationships, work culture, Korean mindsets, and survival guides, helping users quickly discover topics relevant to their own experiences in Korea. To reinforce the playful but educational tone of the brand, the design incorporated modern Korean-inspired illustrations, soft color palettes, and editorial-style layouts optimized for both long-form reading and social media sharing. The final site was developed using Figma Sites, allowing for rapid iteration, responsive layouts, and an efficient no-code workflow while keeping the experience visually polished and easy to expand as new cultural content is added.
