DON'T LXXK UP
Co-founder & software lead of Korea's first high-angle photo booth.
In 2023, as a third-year undergraduate, I co-founded DON’T LXXK UP with my classmate Gwangjin Kim. Every existing self-service photo booth in Korea pointed its camera straight at the customer; ours looks down from above. The high-angle perspective produced a distinct aesthetic that, at the time, no other brand offered.
As software lead, I worked on the kiosk software — a C#/WinForms application written from scratch that coordinates a DSLR (via SDK), a dye-sublimation photo printer, a payment terminal, and a touchscreen UI in a single unattended process. Because the booth runs 24 hours a day, the project gave me hands-on experience designing a reliable program that interacts with diverse hardware and stays tolerant to crashes. The software has been running 24/7 for more than three years since 2023.
Beyond the software, I designed the on-screen interaction flow and the printed photo layouts, and contributed to the physical interior — modeling the booth in CAD and helping choose materials.
We opened the first store at 33 Donggyo-ro 46-gil, Mapo-gu, Seoul, 03982, Republic of Korea in 2023, and the brand has since expanded into a franchise.
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