Ahn Sam-yeol graduated from Hongik University, and worked from 1996 until 2001 at Ahn Graphics (not related). After working as art director at Communications Wow and the magazine Geo, he started his own practice as a graphic and type designer. He has shown his work in many exhibitions, and in 2013, was selected as a winner of type design at the Tokyo TDC Awards for his Ahn Sam-yeol-che.

His new typeface concept, Modern Korean Cursive can be seen as a cursive counterpart to the upright Ahn Sam-yeol-che. In Korean typography, there is a shortage of cursives based on brush-written models. One explanation may be the inherent difficulty of developing cursive Hangul types: as a featural alphabet, Hangul characters are prone to misunderstanding when a small detail is lost or distorted. Perhaps for this reason, cursives or even semi-cursives are rarely found among old Korean metal types: only in modern times appeared a small number of Hangul cursives.

Creating a new Korean cursive typeface, therefore, is a formidable challenge in itself. Furthermore, it is even difficult to imagine a typically fluid, cursive counterpart to Ahn Sam-yeol-che, which is characterized by its “modern” style: upright structure and sharp contrast. Unexpected suggestions, however, may be found in reconsidering the Hangul cursive tradition. Unlike printed documents where cursive letters rarely appear, it is not uncommon to encounter fast-hand cursives in the manuscripts of novels and epistles. While still written with round-pointed writing brushes, the cursives are often characterized by their counterintuitively sharp, angular and rigid strokes: the result of writing fast with a relatively dry brush.