How we drew a knot

1Question

The name ieum comes from the Korean word for to connect. It connects people with AI, and today with tomorrow. What does "to connect" look like, drawn with a single line?

The first answer came as a feeling: a line goes along and a knot forms, it goes on and another knot forms, and the small knots gather into one large knot.

2Structure

Before drawing, we set a few rules.

• One line. It never breaks.
• Flat. No shadows, no depth.
• No gaps where it crosses. The line simply passes over itself, like handwriting.
• The line matches the letters. Its weight and its ends are the same as the letters of eum.

3Experiment

First we drew eight pictures of small knots gathering into a large one. The feeling was there, but shrunk to the size of an app icon, the lines blurred and could not be read.

So we took things away: just a line that makes one loop.

Then we put that loop into the first letter of ieum, the i. Two versions came out. In A, the dot of the i becomes a loop. In B, the line comes in, ties a loop to become the i, and runs on under eum.

We tried other shapes too. A narrow i without the line underneath looked like an l and read as "leum". We tried all capitals. In the end we came back to B: the lowercase line that runs long under the letters.

The company needed a logo too. On our homepage, one line draws a question mark, passes through nine layers of AI one by one, and becomes the head of a person thinking. Inside the head, the folds of the brain were first drawn like a maze. We wanted them to spread like branches, so we borrowed the way tree branches and leaf veins grow.

4Understanding

A knot is not where the line stops. It is where the line is tied so that it can keep going.

ieum does the same. It ties your conversations with AI together, inside your own computer. So a conversation doesn't break off: it carries on into the next one, and into real work.