Pann Lim enjoys the art of giving back

Born to a musician father with a love of art, Pann Lim grew up surrounded by music, busily sketching in his idle moments. But it took the boy who would grow up to be the creative director of Kinetic Singapore (no relation to WPP-owned Kinetic Worldwide) a while to find his feet. 

Never very studious, Lim studied art in an attempt to pass exams that were then known as O Levels. To his surprise, not only did he pass, he qualified for enrolment in Singapore’s junior colleges. 

However, lack of guidance and ignorance of creative career paths saw him bouncing through a number of higher education institutes, studying subjects he wasn’t interested in, such as business management, accounting and physics. Although he passed general knowledge, economics and once again, arts, it wasn’t enough to get him the grade. 

The breakthrough came after he completed national service. It was then that Lim’s college mate Leng Soh, currently an art director at Kinetic, suggested he try a visual communications course at the Temasek Polytechnic School of Design. He describes his experience there as life-changing, bringing him in contact with mentors who set him on his career path. 

After graduation, Lim worked at DDB Singapore, then Batey Ads before founding Kinetic Design & Advertising with Roy Poh, Carolyn Teo and Adrian Tan in 2001 under the Ad Planet Group. 

Today, Lim’s portfolio of work has earned him over 300 awards and last November he was recognised by the Institute of Advertising Singapore’s Hall of Fame as Creative Director of the Year following the win of a silver Cyber Lion at Cannes 2012 for Kinetic’s corporate website.  The uniquely designed site is aimed at “communicating to clients that what worked yesterday may not work today and that every campaign needs to be a new experiment”. The agency also describes the site (ironically, one hopes) as “a smorgasbord of macabre pseudo-science”.

“I don’t like doing safe work and our clients know that we’re nonsensical and fun,” said Lim. “The primary thing is to meet the client’s aims, then it becomes your creative aims. Great work is fresh, beautiful and shareable.”

Those clients include Nike Singapore, Mini Asia, and property developer CDL for which Kinetic Singapore does “a mixture of things,” explains Lim.

“We’ve worked on out-of-home projects for Nike and, last year, we designed a pop-up shop in Peranakan Place which had interactive treadmills with music and graphics that sped up when you run faster and a ceiling made of 60,000 shoelaces.”

The agency, he explains, is multi-disciplined and will create work that fulfils the client’s brief regardless of the method, medium or technology involved. 

Despite long work hours, Lim tries to put his children, aged nine and six, to bed every night. Both his children love to draw and Lim is passionate about passing on his love of art and knowledge of the creative industry to his offspring and to the youth of Singapore — giving them the guidance he lacked. Which is why Lim participates in Noise Singapore, the apprenticeship programme by the National Arts Council targeted at creative talent aged 35 and below and has founded website holycrap.sg (CRAP standing for Claire, Renn, Aira and Pann — himself and his family) for his children to exhibit their artistic work. “I don’t indulge them and I teach them to be better,” he says 

Lim also lectures at the Temasek Polytechnic, the instition that means so much to him, and donates his earnings from teaching there to The Design Society, an NGO he co-founded that is dedicated to promoting design in Singapore. “There’s not enough done for design in Singapore,” he laments.