We Are Dropping a Word — And What That Means

A Founder's Letter from IWBFD Studios

Today I want to tell you about a small change that carries a large meaning. We are officially changing our name from IWBFD Storytelling Studios to IWBFD Studios.

One word — Storytelling — is coming off the marquee. Not because it matters less, but because it matters everywhere.

Why we removed "Storytelling"

When I founded this studio, I put Storytelling in the name to signal what we do. But over the past year, something became clear: storytelling was never the ceiling of our work. It was the floor.

Storytelling is now embedded in every direction we take. It lives inside our books, our magazine, our city projects, our partnerships, our frameworks. Naming it separately started to feel like a restaurant advertising that it serves food. Of course we tell stories. That is the ground we stand on, not the thing we are reaching for.

What we are increasingly asked to do goes further. Clients and cities don't only want a narrative — they want the narrative built. They want the Seoul–Brooklyn agreement actually signed, the conference actually hosted, the framework actually written and shipped. This is the work I call story-doing: constructing the narrative, then doing the real labor that narrative demands. Alongside it sits project design — architecting the structures, the rooms, the rules, and the collaborations that let a story become something you can walk into.

So the name had to grow up. IWBFD Studios holds all of it: storytelling as the given, story-doing and project design as the ambition. Dropping the word is not a subtraction. It is a promise that the word is already inside everything else.

Why the logo changed

Look at the new mark and you'll see it immediately: a blood-red field with the letters carved out in white.

This is not decoration. It is the whole idea.

The concept is simple and, I think, quietly radical: we are all friends. The red is human blood — the thing every one of us carries. We differ in skin, in eyes, in hair, in language, in the cities we come from. We are, gloriously, all different colors. But underneath all of it runs the same blood red. It is the one color we share.

The white letters are the white blood cells — the part of us that protects, that defends, that shows up when the body is under threat. In our mark, the words are the white cells. Language, story, meaning: these are what we send in to protect the shared body we all live in.

So the logo reads as a small anatomy of belonging. Red says we are the same underneath. White says stories are how we take care of each other. Put together, they say the thing I most want this studio to stand for: difference on the surface, kinship at the core.

Bringing the scattered pieces together

There's a third change happening beneath these two, and it may be the most important.

For a long time, our work grew the way real work grows — in pieces. A book here. A magazine there. A city framework in one folder, a service in another, a set of rules and rituals invented for one project and quietly reused in the next. Each piece was alive. But they were living apart.

We are now doing the patient work of bringing it all together. The stories and the story-doing. The frameworks and the field work. The many small rules we've written along the way — how we host, how we publish, how we partner, how we hand a story from one person to the next — are being gathered into a single, coherent body of practice.

This is what the new name and the new mark are really announcing. Not a rebrand for its own sake, but a consolidation. Too many good things were standing alone. We are assembling them into one studio with one bloodstream.

What stays the same

Everything that mattered still matters. We are still a studio built on the belief that mortality is not the enemy of meaning but its source — that knowing we were born for death is exactly what makes the stories worth telling and the work worth doing. The red was always our color. Now it simply says more.

We are still here to tell your story, and increasingly, to help you do it.

What to expect next

Over the coming weeks you'll see the new IWBFD Studios name and the blood-red mark roll out across everything — the site, the magazine, the books, the service pages, the partnerships. If you've followed us as IWBFD Storytelling Studios, nothing you loved is going away. It's all still here, only closer together, and clearer about what it is.

One word lighter. One idea heavier.

Welcome to IWBFD Studios.

Same blood. More story. More doing.

Paul J. J. Kang, Founder & Managing Director, IWBFD Studios | City Storyteller at bcd-W Magazine