Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Don Lee. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Don, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

My name is Donghoon Lee (I go by Don!) I am an art director originally from South Korea, currently based in New York. I work at YouTube Creative Studio and lead the creative side of marketing campaigns. At YouTube, as a creative art director, I mainly develop YouTube’s brand key moments such as Coachella, Artist Breakthrough Moments with Taylor Swift, BTS, and Blackpink, and creating new trends on YouTube Shorts. Before joining YouTube, I worked in the agency world at places such as MullenLowe and DDB where I had the opportunity to work with the best in the industry. Prior to working in advertising and marketing, I was a teacher, teaching students in marginalized communities or with disabilities, as I majored in educational technology. I believe I may be the only creative in the world with this major, so it might make for an interesting Hinge profile.

Outside of work, I enjoy exploring New York City by running different routes every day to discover hidden gems in the city, and recently started making weird potteries.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

My name is Donghoon Lee (I go by Don!) I am an art director originally from South Korea, currently based in New York. I work at YouTube Creative Studio and lead the creative side of marketing campaigns. At YouTube, as a creative art director, I mainly develop YouTube’s brand key moments such as Coachella, Artist Breakthrough Moments with Taylor Swift, BTS, and Blackpink, and creating new trends on YouTube Shorts. Before joining YouTube, I worked in the agency world at places such as MullenLowe and DDB where I had the opportunity to work with the best in the industry. Prior to working in advertising and marketing, I was a teacher, teaching students in marginalized communities or with disabilities, as I majored in educational technology. I believe I may be the only creative in the world with this major.

Outside of work, I enjoy exploring New York City by running different routes every day to discover hidden gems in the city, and recently started making weird potteries.

Have you ever had to pivot?

As I mentioned earlier, I believe I may be the only creative art director in the world who majored in educational technology. Some may be curious as to why an edu-tech major would be working as a creative.

Since I was young, my vision was to use my skills to make the world a better place than when I was born. I chose to major in educational technology because I believe that education can make the world a better place. But in short, I became frustrated because I realized that education takes a tremendous amount of time to change someone’s life. Unfortunately, I am not a very patient person (like many creatives). But it was one random day in an edu-tech class that my professor showed an advertisement as a ‘different way to change a learner’s behavior.’ I remember it was a Japanese commercial for “Carre de Chocolat.” After watching that, I immediately wanted to experience that chocolate. At the same time, it was an epiphany moment for me because a short creative film affected my emotions and future behavior, something I was struggling to achieve in education. As an impatient person, I didn’t hesitate to make a spec ad storyboard overnight and submitted it to an advertising program from one of the biggest advertising agencies in Korea. Luckily, I was accepted and surrounded by the best in the industry.

This moment was the story of how I had to pivot to follow my vision of making a greater impact on the world, and it changed my life entirely. Since then, I have won international advertising awards, was invited to award shows in New York, and was led to creative agencies in the US, which led me to relocate. Now, I am surrounded by creatives with the brightest minds from all around the world and am able to use my creativity for YouTube, which has a positive impact across the world by decentralizing educational opportunity and information distribution, fulfilling my original vision of making the world a better place.

This educational background is more useful than any other art or design skills I learned throughout my career, because it really helps me prioritize the understandability of my work and the probability of changing human behavior. Education is all about understanding students, making them learn something, and changing their behavior. The fundamentals of marketing and advertising are also the same – it’s all about understanding target audiences, making them recognize and understand our product, and then making them buy it. So, I have brought a lot of educational techniques (especially psychology) into the advertising world, and it works well. Especially as an art director at YouTube, which reaches billions of viewers in every corner of the world, this background always helps me start with the viewer’s standpoint and come up with universal visual and art direction that can be understood by any culture beyond language.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

Being a creative is very rewarding because it makes me a better person than I was yesterday, in terms of both my personal life and career.

First, in terms of my personal life, being a creative makes me a better person every day. Once you decide to become a creative, your life requires endless learning because you are what you consume. My creations are based on what I am experiencing, which makes me take a closer look at this world. I get to learn about unknown areas and it expands my horizon. For example, during my project “Black Lives Matter Font,” it made me learn more about the movement’s history and pushed me to learn HTML/CSS code and how to create a live web font to execute it. Later, this experience helped me connect with some activists and designers who were working on this matter after being featured in Communication Arts Magazine and The Guardian across the world. I gained a bigger world view and got to know more diverse aspects of the world because I was working in the creative side.

Second, in terms of my work, it helps me pay attention to and keep up with what’s going on in the world. The creative industry celebrates creativity and I was judging creative works from the world’s best creative people for the New York Festival Advertising Award last year. At first, I participated because I wanted to be inspired by ad works, but what I actually experienced was the fact that there are so many problems in the world and each of these are unique and creativity is being used to solve these problems. I judged around 100 entries submitted from various countries and this experience taught me how people in various parts of the world live, and I could learn more than through any other media or news. Whenever I see the work other people made, I feel a creative hunger and want to create a creative solution that makes people’s lives better with my creativity.

Lastly, with creative work, I can reach more people than I could ever imagine. Some successful campaigns at YouTube with artist partners like BTS and Blackpink reached billions of people across the world, not only in the US, but also in India, Korea, Japan, China, Brazil, France, to name a few, and elicited more than a million of their fans to participate after experiencing my creative work. This was something completely impossible if I had chosen a non-creative job. Whenever I see millions of people feeling excited and happy when they interact with my work, the thrill and rewarding feeling is indescribable. It gives me a feeling that I contributed to their lives in a meaningful way.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://dondoesthat.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dondoesthat/