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JAEYONGBAE
EN/KR
Role
Solo
With
Air Force HQ, Public Affairs
Period
Spring 2024
Links
Featured in

Republic of Korea Air Force F-4 retirement goods

Thank You, Our Dokkaebi

F-4 retirement goods packaging
F-4 retirement goods packaging

Summary

In-house design work from 21 months at the Air Force HQ Media Content Division (Oct 2023 – Jun 2025). On the F-4 Phantom retirement task force I designed the commemorative goods and co-planned the retirement content. The other project from the same posting is Hi, High!.

Overview

The task force was run by the Ministry of National Defense, and I owned the goods. They were the official gift at the media day and the retirement ceremony.

Some 220 F-4s had guarded Korean airspace since the mid-1960s. The aircraft closed 55 years of service with a farewell flight in May 2024: four Phantoms and two KF-21 Boramae, South Korea's next fighter, flying three hours over the Gyeonggi, Jeolla and Gyeongsang provinces. The official ceremony followed on 7 June. The flight was reported abroad as well – Aeroflap, 13 May 2024.

The work

I redrew the dokkaebi, the Phantom's symbol, rather than the aircraft. A friendly, Korean-painting treatment, so that every generation at the ceremony recognised the same thing. The same drawing ran across the media-day and ceremony goods.

"Finding the Phantom", the YouTube content I co-planned, reached 400,000 views – three times the earlier series. For that work the media content division received the Air Force's 2024 "People Who Made the Air Force Shine" group award – a division award, not an individual one.

Reflection

The people approving the work were not designers. So I made the evidence visible. Dozens of AI-generated variants, laid side by side, turned a question of taste into a question of choice.