Yuha Lotus Cho is a Graphic and Visual Designer, currently designing at Mother Design. She is based in New York, United States and Seoul, South Korea. She was previously at No Ideas. She holds an BFA from the School of Visual Arts. She specializes in brand identity, brand strategy, editorial design, web design, and art direction.
Masanao Hirayama works with ordinary tools—ballpoint pens, markers—drawing simple, repetitive lines on paper. His childlike imagery, infused with quiet humor and emotion, feels intentionally unpolished. By holding back, the work points to something essential, without over-explaining it.
I often return to this idea of essence. Searching the concept of Nothing(無) in wikipedia reveals countless philosophical interpretations, but one thought from Jean-Paul Sartre continues to linger. In Being and Nothingness, he describes humans as beings that are not yet: defined by freedom, always projecting forward, always planning. That sense of nothingness feels deeply connected to our constant hunger for stimulation, our need to keep moving, filling ourselves, and becoming something more.
We rarely stop to ask whether the things we chase are truly necessary, or whether they're just more noise piled on top of noise. In a culture that equates progress with speed, novelty, and abundance, complexity is almost never questioned. It gets added by default. But I believe clarity doesn't come from accumulating more — it comes from taking things away.
At times, rather than introducing more systems, more images, more signals, there is value in removing, carefully and deliberately, what no longer serves us. In that act of reduction, we create space to return to something more instinctive and direct: a quieter attention to our most basic impulses, and to the essence that remains once the noise falls away.