A week-long, seven part series about contemporary Japanese Graphic Design. Today’s initial post offers a critique of the current international graphic design retrospective exhibition traveling across the United States and its disavowal of graphic design culture outside of America and Western Europe. This will be followed by a series of posts highlighting contemporary Japan-based graphic design activity of interest, introducing assorted designers, design studios, and other, more wide-ranging practices.

2011 saw the opening of Graphic Design: Now in Production, a massive, sprawling exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with the exhibition set to later travel to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in North Carolina.

Accompanying the exhibition is the release of a catalog with the same title. Andrew Blauvelt of the Walker Art Center and Ellen Lupton of the Cooper-Hewitt curated both, with Ian Albinson of artofthetitle.com, Jeremy Leslie of magCulture.com, and Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio of BrandNew/Under Consideration in additional curatorial roles.

The catalog’s introduction reads that the book is “Gently inspired by The Last Whole Earth Catalog,” mixing “short chunks of text with images from contemporary practice, anchored by a series of longer essays.” The introduction speaks about the pitfalls of attempting to shore up a recent history, in particular the past decade, of graphic design as a sphere of activity and production, and in this respect, the catalog falls far short of its attempt at documenting graphic design on a truly global scale.

Methodologically, putting together a paragraph about assorted practices, projects, methodologies, and visual trends is a fairly easy task. As a practicing graphic designer, I was aware of an easy ninety percent of the projects covered within the book. Sure, it takes time to write 500 short paragraphs about 500 subjects, but all within are easy targets.

As usual, Experimental Jetset get a disproportionate amount of coverage and fills it with a cocky, one-trick pony, having distilled a “punk rock” reaction to design practice and history and then slathering it with an easy quote from a dead theorist.¹ Åbäke get their usual turn, as well — their poor form and “exploratory” practice² backed up with the somehow still “cool” “parasite magazine” hogging up a handful of pages. I do not disagree that Experimental Jetset and Åbäke should be mentioned and get their fair due — I mean, where would we be in this contemporary age overwrought with Helvetica without EJ?³ — but are they so important as to trot out visual and semantic equivalents of a wet fart as “premium” content for this catalog and have it go unmentioned? And wouldn’t the Åbäke parasite magazine reduced to a photo with a blurb jutting from the gutter of one page be enough?

Then, there are the glaring omissions. Where is the wild and exciting form-making of Universal Everything/Matt Pyke? Where are Craig Mod‘s lovely paeans about electronic publishing and design? Where are Nieves and the current trend of content-lite chapbooks masquerading as zines? Where is the @font-face/webfont revolution? Where are Northern Mexico’s amazing DJ logos? I mean, the church-burning black metal cult get their moment via Christophe Szpajdel‘s Bic pen acrobatics, but what about the blissed-out folks surrounded by terror, yet exercising none themselves? And why the hell is the Linux logo in there? No graphic designer gives a shiiiiiit about that thing. In short, the state of graphic design is on fire (or at the very least is being subjected to an overwhelming amount of shortsightedness), but everyone’s too busy Tweeting and “starting up” and mimicking old Archis layouts to get down to business.

What is truly lacking in the book and exhibition is a sense of scope: Graphic Design: Now in Production represents a North American/Western European worldview toward graphic design that eschews the labors of much of the world. Notably absent is much mention of recent graphic design activity in Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific. With short-format writing the dominant trend at the present moment, solid strategic thinking should be present in initiatives to represent any holistic approach to an area of cultural production. Sure, the writing can be short and pithy, but it should be far-reaching in the material covered.

If observed on a macro-level, certain countries get the short end of the stick. Korea, for one, is wholly unrepresented in the catalog. The most influential graphic designer in that country Ahn Sang-Soo receives no mention despite the fact that his work has revolutionized and energized graphic design as an area of intensified interest. Younger, well-known Korean graphic designers whom have studied abroad such as Sulki and Min Choi also do not appear in the book, even though they have instigated a very defined and widely-published aesthetic and methodological approach⁴. Less well-known, but equally influential and highly participatory projects such as Ondol/A Few Warm Stones⁵ are also ignored. In essence, the message from America being sent is, “Thanks, Korea. We’ll gladly take your study abroad students, but we’ll be damned if we’ll acknowledge any contributions from your country.”

Also lacking are contributions from so many other countries — the effect of easily available software and computing on Ethiopian and Eritrean music packaging, the Thai signage landscape, branding in Singapore, and innumerable others. New Zealand gets a random single hit through the work of David Bennewith‘s monograph on Joseph Churchward, but nowhere is Kris Sowersby, New Zealand’s immensely popular leading type designer.

Japan, the country in which I reside, gets a mention in the catalog, though one that is fleeting and not wholly correct. The activity of the Morisawa Corporation gets a brief writeup by curator Andrew Blauveldt:

Morisawa
The Japanese language employs three different language systems: kanji, hiragana and katakana, representing thousands of characters. This reality, coupled with the complex nature of character strokes, makes font design for the Japanese language especially difficult and demanding. Japan’s leading maker of fonts is Morisawa, a company whose roots reach back to 1924. Morisawa typically spends up to four years to meticulously render its typefaces, which can be found throughout the country in use on everything from signs to screens.

A more accurate description is that the Japanese visual language is comprised of a number of other systems, as well as including Latin characters and analphabetic symbols.⁶; To be ignored is one matter, but for a whole country’s activity to be given a glossed-over, under-informed conflation through the prism of a sole company/easy target is just as insulting. Sure, Morisawa is the biggest type foundry/distributor in Japan, but the company is by no means the best. The past decade has seen Morisawa’s primary advance be a push for annual font licensing through their Morisawa Passport subscription program, not the development of excellent typefaces. Many smaller type foundries have popped up or refined their game, offering far more formally thorough typefaces that render better at smaller sizes than Morisawa’s. In essence, an attempt at an easy summation and a lack of sophisticated understanding is provided in lieu of in-depth cultural analysis. (Moreover, if the Morisawa entry was not included, this whole essay most likely would have never come into being.)

Morisawa is an odd choice as the representative of design activity in Japan. Known quantities/old guard such as Hara Kenya and his work for Muji, Groovisions, Nakajima Hideki, and Sugiura Kohei are not mentioned. Newer Japanese practitioners whose work is widely respected and whom have helped shape global aesthetics over the past decade such as W+K Tokyo Lab (in the realm of formally rich, detail-oriented motion graphics), Dainippon Type Organization (operating at the intersection of concept and modular typography/lettering), and Nakamura Yugo’s THA (trailblazing web-based aesthetics and practices⁷) also go unmentioned. In their stead, the reader is lobbed an easy, sloppy catch — akin to summing up American graphic design as summarized by Adobe or British graphic design as being exemplified by Monotype Imaging Ltd.

Aside from purely typographic and orthographic concerns, Graphic Design: Now in Production neatly mirrors the lack of regard and research exhibited by graphic design-oriented writers and researchers toward areas other than Western Europe and North America since the establishment of a body of writing about graphic design as a practice.⁸ Graphic design is not merely an America/Euro-centric First World pursuit, and the cultures and histories surrounding the development of graphic design elsewhere are worthy of pursuit.

It is with this disregard for acknowledgement and discontent with the cultural viewpoint expressed in Graphic Design: Now in Production that we have put together Japanese Graphic Design: Not in Production. Gently inspired by a myopic worldview of graphic design activity, and mimicking the form and format of Graphic Design: Now in Production, what will follow shortly is an overview of contemporary Japanese graphic design practices in a mix of short-format texts accompanying images with outbound links in the version here.⁹ The focus of this feature is equally myopic, showing only a number of important projects and practices from within Japan that have surfaced in the past decade. It is my hope that it will act as a localized supplement to the greater understanding of design activity.

Japanese Graphic Design: Not in Production focuses on the activities of highly active designers, type foundries and Japanese design publications from the past ten years. The goal of this section is to help promote cognizance of graphic design activity in Japan — acknowledgement of such activity is often hindered by the linguistic and social differences between Japan and the rest of the world, yet this gap is lessening. The activity of publications like Idea and +81; Japan-based international designers like Helmut Schmid and AQ; and internationally-minded Japanese graphic designers like Hara Kenya have helped to increase the communication and awareness of Japanese graphic design as a sector of culture and cultural production. It is my hope that the follow-up feature helps serve the same purpose. It is by no means a holistic, comprehensive collation of all important graphic design activity in contemporary Japan, and pointedly veers in the direction of smaller, more critically-oriented practices and publications.10

A culture having a different language and a divergent history does not make the culture off-limits for international review. This should be a challenge to individuals examining graphic design as documentarians — the world is larger than navel-gazing information graphics analyzing one’s personal consumption habits, as popular as that may be. Other languages and cultures are intensely more interesting in the long run. In particular, Japan’s history in regards to graphic design has been under-analyzed in the English language, both in the historic and contemporary schemes¹¹. It is worth straying from the comfortable and easily understood to cast a wider net: observing and analyzing graphic design from a wider perspective. It is also worth questioning what is presented in officious formats: because something is plated does not make it food. In the case of Graphic Design: Now in Production, this analogy may not be wholly apt, but I, for one, left the dinner table still feeling hungry.

¹ I really, really wonder how “important” Experimental Jetset really are. They have a staggeringly huge body of work, but when conflated, it is often a simplistic collection: “One concept/visual style per project only, please move along…” This was discussed more at length in the essay “With A Spatula In Her Hand” in my self-published The Space Is The Place Supplement and reprinted in Slanted Magazine #19.

² Åbäke have made it excusable for every half-baked cultural practice to parade itself as being somehow graphic design-oriented.

³ Their “self-critiquing” works have already been wrung and hung out to dry by Randy Nakamura in “On The Uselessness of Design Citicism”.

⁴ Notably, that of the Werkplaats Typogrpaphie.

⁵ Ondol is a student research project led by Chris Ro that explores Korean graphic design and typographic history in journal form also go unnoticed. With only two volumes published to date, Ondol has already greatly added to the discourse and body of Korean graphic design literature, education, and understanding.

⁶ The following is excerpted from Japanese Typography Part One: Building Blocks, published in Slanted #11:

The core components of the Japanese language:

kanji
This is the family of Chinese logographic characters imported to Japan which are utilized to write nouns and the bases of verbs and adjectives. Kanji are morphograms — visual symbols which represent words rather than sounds. They can be a bit confusing, however, in that the forms of Chinese calligraphy were borrowed and used to represent natively Japanese concepts and subjects. Some kanji are fairly direct pictograms, while others represent ideas. Kanji include huge numbers of compound characters, as well. Some kanji can have up to ten different readings (base meanings/morphemes).

There are over 50,000 characters that comprise the kanji system, though between 2,000 to 3,000 are in common use in Japan.

hiragana
The syllabic family of Japanese characters that can be used to spell out words phonetically, be that a form of kanji, or not, as is the case for many Japanese words to inflect language. Hiragana developed from Chinese characters used to aid pronunciation, a practice which originated in the 5th century. Originally, there was more than one hiragana character for each syllable in the Japanese language, but this was reformed in 1900, and one character (or character set) was codified for each sound. Hiragana, being simplified calligraphic characters, are formally fluid and graceful.

There are 46 hiragana characters currently in use.

katakana
The syllabic family of Japanese characters utilized for words from foreign languages, onomatopoeia, and to spell out difficult kanji-based words. Katakana were potentially developed from simplified Chinese characters as a form of shorthand, though a conflicting and disputed theory exists that they are a form of imported script from Korea.

There are 46 hiragana characters currently in use.

romaji
The Western alphabet, sprinkled liberally throughout written Japanese where appropriate for ease, atmosphere and communicativity. Latin lettering is often simplified in terms of the omission of macrons and circumflexes necessary to pronounce Japanese words correctly (which just leads to further confusion for all involved).

numerals
Based on Chinese numerals, there are a number of systems including a common one that utilizes a minimum of strokes per character, as well as a formal numbering system used for financial documents.

punctuation
Japanese punctuation is as highly developed as punctuation in Western languages, though very different formally. For example, in lieu of quotation marks, Japanese uses its own form, called kagikakko, i.e.:「Hello!」Western punctuation is utilized, as well, in particular question and exclamation marks.

non-alphabetic characters
Included in most Japanese digital typefaces is a large collection of marks and symbols used to delineate abstract ideas such as “postal code” (〒)

The Japanese language is a mix of all of these different systems, each with several subcategories.

⁷ i.e: Ffffound!, Pinterest’s precursor and archetype

⁸ That being said, despite many design educators’ grumblings, Philip Meggs and Alston Purvis should be praised for the brief history of Japanese commercial art that was folded into their History of Graphic Design.

⁹ The print version of this essay is bolstered by texts not applicable to Néojaponisme’s Japan-centric focus.

10 The work of more popular designers such as Hara Kenya and Nakajima Hideki get a fair amount of play in the contemporary global graphic design press at present.

¹¹ Korea’s even less so.

Train ads and posters are popping up in Tokyo advertising the city’s aspiration to host the 2020 Olympic Games. Adorning the posters is one of the most unimaginative logo designs of recent years, and as expected, a retrograde return to the expected visual formula for Olympics after the hard left turn that was the branding of the London 2012 Olympics. (Logo pictured above – also, hover over the images for the first full-color graphics on Néojaponisme to date.¹)

The website promoting Tokyo’s candidacy as the 2020 Olympic city says this about the proposed logo:

The logo comprises an arrangement of cherry blossoms, Japan’s most celebrated flower, and supports the efforts of Tokyo as its bid to host the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The logo has been designed to symbolise the concepts of friendship and peace, and the floral motif expresses the feelings of deep gratitude inherent in Japan’s sending of cherry blossom trees to all parts of the world.

In addition to the Olympic colours of red, blue, yellow and green, the design incorporates the traditional Japanese Edo purple, a colour that featured prominently in cultural festivals, events, etc. in Japan’s Edo period (1603-1867). Each individual petal and the circular wreath shape of cherry blossoms represent the interconnectivity and interdependence of the world.

As the wreath has no beginning and no end, the logo also signifies the concepts of eternity, happiness and a continuous unbroken cycle. The design also embodies the strength of feeling that underpins Tokyo’s bid to bring the Olympic and Paralympic Games back to Japan for the first time since 1964, and the firm conviction that the Games will serve as a catalyst for the reinvigoration and regeneration of the whole of Japan.

The logo was designed by Ai Shimamine, a Japanese student in a competition to submit logo designs for the bid. Her winning entry was selected by a panel of judges comprising Tokyo 2020 CEO Masato Mizuno, award-winning designer Kashiwa Sato, and leading script writer Kundo Koyama.

While the branding is described as such on the website, how it is being used in public has a bit of a twist — the posters and train ads (one pictured below) include the five Olympic rings as well. In essence, the logo, an obvious conflation of the Olympic rings and the hinomaru² with a decorative treatment of randomly colored sakura vector illustrations, needed the visual components spelled out for the public, as the mark itself isn’t a stable enough signifier on its own.

Being a product of student design work, it’s worth critiquing this logo as being exemplary of the type of lazy graphic design education standards that are currently upheld in much of Japan’s design university curricula.

1. Lazy type
The logo uses DIN, one of the world’s most non-offensive typefaces, then mimics the type treatment of Kamekura Yusaku’s 1964 Olympic logo placement of the hinomaru between the “Tokyo” and the year. To some, it’s perhaps a nod to history, though I’d reckon it’s just an easy, unimaginative swipe.

2. Hamburger Hot Dog
The conflation of sakura cherry blossoms (sure, sakura are fine when they are in bloom and are a widely acknowledged symbol of Japan) and the color treatment of Olympic colors along with the distinctly non-Edo era-evocative purple are exemplary of weak conceptual thinking and the most obvious “visual solution” applied, then bolstered by the application of another weak “concept.”

I refer to this type of design as a “hamburger hot dog” — two distinctly obvious choices forced together (or, more colloquially, the inverse of peanut butter and chocolate: two great tastes that absolutely don’t go together). I get hit with this kind of thing weekly on the critique wall in my graphic design classes at Temple University Japan and insist that my students start over each time. The Modern age of “The Big Idea” in graphic design is over, but moreover, when you take what someone purports to be a Big Idea, but is actually a fairly Small Idea, and then apply an even Smaller Idea to attempt to reify your attempt at a Big Idea, and all you wind up with is visual and conceptual mud.

3. Pizza Pizza Pizza
The rings plus the circle plus the wreath is the visual equivalent of saying the same thing three times in a row.

4. Cabbage Topping
Somehow a little cabbage got tucked into the top of the logo, as well. (I understand that it’s supposed to be a sakura bud, but it just looks like a cabbage, or at the very best, a brussel sprout.)

5. Spec Work
I hate design competitions, and moreover, I hate student design competitions. Sure, it may help that student get a job after school, but design competitions are a form of speculative labor. We don’t participate in design competitions with my design studio⁴, and I actively encourage my students to not participate in design competitions, as well. School should be a time for exploration and experimenting in the laboratory, not aping market rules, visual trends, and reductive thinking. Why can’t the Tokyo Olympic committee afford to pay someone for something that is going to make them a lot of money whether Tokyo wins the bid or not?

6. Y-A-W-N
As inflammatory as it is, Wolff Olins’ design for the London 2012 Olympics constituted an about-face on the typical “easy on the eyes” variety of graphic design and branding schlock that has been continually foisted upon the Olympic games. The London branding was divisive and engaging, and in that way, embodies so much of what the Olympics are about: They are a series of true competitions, not mere visual coddling and cheap ethnic variations of the same theme. I am a fan of design that challenges — and London’s branding did. The proposed Tokyo Olympic branding most certainly does not. It has neither the visual complexity nor conceptual depth/ambiguity to sustain multiple viewings.

Summary:
All in all, there’s just not a whole lot to grab on to visually or semiotically⁵. The 2020 Candidate City logo is all surface, but one that isn’t slick enough to sustain. It feels like repetitive clip art and weak themes (not concepts⁶) taken to their too-logical conclusion.

Craft-wise, the symbol feels amateurishly executed and displays a frightening lack of adeptness at the contemporary tools of design (notably the designer’s inability to correctly draw vectors in Illustrator — if design educators cannot teach students how to handle design-oriented thinking, they should at the very least be able to impart craft and correct practices in designing).

Most of all, I worry that I’m going to have to be stuck looking at this thing over and over again for the next eight years⁷. Train rides are mundane enough, but even a bit of recurring engaging graphic design makes each ride just that much better.

¹ You’re welcome, Alin.

² Also known as a circle.

³ Shimamine is a student at Joshibi.

⁴ I was approached regarding a speculative project this week for a non-profit, who insisted that it was 100% acceptable to, in essence, donate a day of my time to provide them with a free stab at their home page redesign. My response paraphrased:

“I’m sorry, but we cannot work for free. I have to set precedents, hence our not-working-with-Third-World-contractors policy and our not-doing-spec-work policy. Absolutely nothing good comes out of these situations — you’ll get a rushed design (which still takes hours of labor on our end) and we start our professional relationship in a non-professional manner which will have repercussions later.
We staunchly refuse to work spec because it means that:
A. The (not-quite-a-)client doesn’t understand that design is more than cultural hairdressing.
B. It sets a precedent for an unprofessional financial relationship. I don’t ask my clients for handouts, why is it acceptable the other way ’round?
C. There are no guarantees. I bet that if we agreed and did it, your company wouldn’t match our proposed budget after we provided the first round for free.
To be frank, if you proceed with a design/development studio that agrees to spec work, I bet you’re going to be disappointed in the future. Professionals act professionally and those that take on spec labor are usually the least professional in terms of output.”

⁵ The logo is not a visual metaphor, metonym, simile or anything truly thoughtful. In the end, it’s a ring of flowers that apes the look of the Unilever logo and other contemporary modular logos without the thought involved.

⁶ One of the most angering things about graphic design education in Japan is the confusion of themes, style and concept — one is not the other; however educators rarely, if ever, take the time to explain this in either the historical context or the contemporary one. Concepts can be executed stylishly, a la Robert Brownjohn and Barney Bubbles, however most design faculty in Japan tend to gloss over the finer points of conceptual thinking in an applied setting. Mere surface style is served up as a substitute for a balance of form and concept in most Japanese design university classroom settings. Even worse, style is discussed inadequately, leading to the current generation of Japanese graphic designers being unable to either make holistic work, much less talk about it. (The point: Graphic design education in Japan stinks and needs a real boot to the tuckus.)

⁷ An analogue can be found in issue #19 of Slanted Magazine within the section titled “Japanese Graphic Design: Not In Production” in which I wrote about Zombie Modernism 2.0 and my desire for ambiguity and contradiction in graphic design, not simplistic formula-based design.

The section functions as an overview of contemporary critical graphic design in Japan and as a critique of the myopic tendencies of the current American graphic design retrospective Graphic Design: Now In Production.

A giant “happy new year!” from all of us at Néojaponisme! May the new year bring you bucketfuls of amazingness!

It has been a year since Akiyama Shin quietly took down his shop in Shinjuku, closing the revered schtücco design studio, entrusting his former staff with the care of a number of important clients, and returning northward to the humble fold of country life in his home prefecture of Niigata with his wife/collaborator Ayako and newborn son. Tokyo lost an important and vital member of our design community at that moment — prolific and craft-centric in his output, thoughtful in his philosophy and approach. This quiet, humble man’s exit stage-left is something worth noting.1

His departure was followed by a flurry of activity: most notably, a post-mortem, live-in retrospective at Pantaloon an Osaka-based gallery and design studio, which saw schtücco’s oeuvre filling the walls of the entire space alongside misprints, proof sheets, book dummies and a rearrangement of the materials within the space. A tent and catalogued inventory of everything the young family would be using during their month-long stay within the gallery — vegetables, clothing, cloth diapers and technology were all ordered, stacked and itemized — reflecting the Akiyama family’s subsumption into a now totalizing collapse of work, life and art.

A series of lectures and events accompanied the exhibition, individuals from Tokyo and Osaka invited to Pantaloon to engage with Akiyama in dialogue for the public, exploring the roles of design in relation to art, literature, music, and the everyday. Curators, artists, editors, and designers were all invited to speak candidly about work and what design holds for us all at this particular moment. All were invited into a sort of temporary community with Akiyama and his family as its pillar in a rare moment of personal reflection that is usually rare in the hustle-bustle of Japanese business.2

The exhibition and associated events gave nuanced form to so much of Akiyama’s way of working — one that is engaged politically, aesthetically and socially. Everyday graphic design in Tokyo is prominently service-oriented3 and to have this act of servicing brought into a gallery, and then, most importantly, destabilized by emphasizing the more personal, authored, community-centric aspects of a critical and speculative graphic design practice in a setting that had simultaneously been deconstructed and reconstructed according to the designer’s personal vision, exposed the public to alternate ways of working that had potentially not been experienced in Japan before.4

Akiyama’s formal education in architecture is belied by his personal works. Created under the nom de guerre Buku Akiyama, they are a quiet structural assessment of the everyday combined with the bookmaker’s lexical desire for order and cataloging. This on-again/off-again art practice is best documented in his 2009 book, Composition No.2 “an exceptional state”: with equipments owned by hiromiyoshii. Within, Akiyama’s reorganization of FARM, an exhibition space in the Kiyosumi area of Tokyo, was photographed by Masahito Yamamoto, documenting Akiyama’s event in which he took the contents of the studio and rearranged all into structures, three-dimensional compositions, and system-like collections. The book, designed by schtücco and published by Akiyama’s own publishing house edition nord, appears to be damaged, the spine of each in the edition of 600 intentionally torn off, exposing Akiyama’s fascination with raw material and process.

edition nord is both a conceptual celebration and exploration of the most instinctive and primary elements of art-making, combining the immediacy of the found, rapid mark-making and narrative — spinning and folding these attributes into physical forms that are a taught tension of crafted precision and the raw materiality of chance processes. The typography within is highly considered and abundant in its exploration of different methods of reproduction. Papers, printing, and the visual edit that holds each together is rugged and assured — a poised conflation that reveals the authored instinct. As a collection, Akiyama’s work feels like the output of an individual involved to the deepest levels with his craft, rendered in often stark palettes alongside considered typographic scales akin to musical compositions. In all, there is a palpable sense of the book as an expanse that engages the reader physically, mentally, and emotionally — it is not treated as mere printed physical ephemera.

Past edition nord titles have included compendiums of work for artists such as Masanao Hirayama/HIMAA, Tadashi Kawamata, Eiki Mori, and Komichi Kobayashi. The imprint’s inaugural release, an edition of eight hundred bound boxes of photographs exactly reproduced from source material provided by artist Christian Holstad for a 2007 exhibition titled “Blood Bath & Beyond.” The printed cards within question the authorship of the photograph and the concept of assumed identity depicted in the reproductions — a collation of imagery of masked and costumed individuals. The box was the result of two years of labor, mimicking the physical qualities of the original photographs, working with printers to adjust the sheen and surface of each printed replica of the found photographs to perfection, including original inscriptions and backing material on all thirty-eight pieces within the collection. Beyond authorship, these near-exact duplicates bring into question the nature of the copy versus the original in a profoundly Habermasian way; the originals are merely found whereas the reproductions are collated (and thus categorized), given additional focus through the lens of ‘art’5 and monetized. Perhaps it is no accident that the vehicle for delivering these media is a box, as the edition opens contemporary art practices and art publishing strategies up to a bevy of compelling questions.

Shin’s new stüccke line of books for edition nord explore drawing as a medium and focus, most notably Kawai Misaki’s Pencil Exercise — a mammoth compendium of quick, mirth-filled line drawings. This 500-page expanse of quirky mark-making that evince Kawai’s place as the heir to the throne of art-making dominated by so many skateboarders (most notably Mark Gonzales) creating loose, off-the-cuff works that celebrate life, absurdity, and the world around us with more than a pinch of atavistic tendencies. These books are held together using the most spare, yet strongest material. The covers are minimal or essentially dematerialized, taking the form of postcards or smaller sheets of paper. Added to this Is a sense of customization. Kawaii’s book features eight different “cover” designs, a minimal foreground to the mono-color drawings that comprise the edition.

It is natural that Akiyama has turned to self-publishing. the establishment of the edition nord imprint followed fifteen years of designing books and printed promotional materials for some of Tokyo’s most successful galleries, notably hiromiyoshi. Akiyama has designed books for artists such as photographer Araki Nobuyoshi, sculptor/painter Keegan McHargue6, architect Ando Tadao, as well as innumerable others. It is also curious as to what Akiyama’s trajectory from here will be, as a publisher and as a graphic designer. I, for one, am curious- his arc in graphic design and self-initiated curatorial projects is a potential blueprint for how graphic design might be practiced in a distinct way in Japan that veers from the mere labor-based model so prevalent today. It is ‘merely’ a matter of public awareness, acknowledgement and encouragement — phenomena that often occur slowly in a nation slow to change. If picked up and ran with, it’d infinitely enrich design culture in Japan.

1 Despite Akiyama’s pastoral retreat from Tokyo, he is still very much an active force in the city, representing edition nord at the Tokyo Art Book Fair, appearing alongside Kawai at the opening for the Pencil Exercise exhibition and book release.

2 I note this from personal experience, I engaged in the series, giving a lecture and a short question-and-answer session with Akiyama. I am grateful to him for his politeness at me hogging the mic like an American jerk.

3 As noted in my recent lecture series in the United States, the life of the graphic designer residing in Tokyo is often stark — graphic designers tend to work far-longer hours than their American and European counterparts and earn approximately 60% of what their Western counterparts do. There are exceptions, but they are few and far-between.

A personal, anonymized case study:
Naoko is a friend and graphic designer working for a small architecture publishing house. She begins work at 10am and finishes work at 4am. She has not had a day off this month — crafting books, printed promotional material, creating booth designs for book fairs and generally helping out around the office. She is paid approximately ¥2.8 million a year — a near-unlivable wage.

4 This being said, Yokoo Tadanori has continually created situations of a similar nature in the 1960s and 1970s that upheld his stature as a designer, artist, hedonist, and creative individual. But these events tended to be in the service of a cult of personality surrounding Yokoo, as opposed to extending the sphere of public/private and engaging communities as done by Akiyama. Akiyama utilized his relative fame to set public dialogue and critique in motion, whereas Yokoo utilized his actual fame (also relative, but stratospheric compared to Akiyama’s renown merely amongst designers) to propel himself into engaging in self-serving creative projects spanning television (titles for the television show むー), getting his photo taken with John Lennon and Yoko Ono (synergy by association), and acting (in a mediocre fashion in the film 僕は天使じゃないよ/Boku Wa Tenshi Ja Nai Yo).

5 And the gallery system which commodifies art.

6 It was McHargue who introduced me to Akiyama in 2007, during the run of his successful solo show “Mauve Deep”C at hiromiyoshi. McHargue, artist Tauba Auerbach, the Akiyamas and I wended our way through a succession of obscure record stores in Shinjuku, watching as McHargue dutifully dug out new additions to his expansive record collection. No mere name drop, McHargue recognized the intensity in which both Akiyama and myself have articulated our positions within the realm of design. I am merely grateful for the introduction.

A The name and subject matter of the designer’s publishing house has been changed — to open up standard business practices in Japan through the concrete example of an individual is to ruin a person’s career.

B That Yokoo’s varied methodologies and career turns have never been exposed to serious criticism in the design or popular press is case for worry, hence these barbed stings that occasionally appear in my essays.

C I would also like to note that this exhibition title is pretty much the most awesome title for an exhibition ever.

While researching the history of Onitsuka Tiger’s branding and graphic design, I came across an odd, yet highly appealing piece of custom lettering on the company’s ONICK ski boots from the 1970s. Reminiscent of aspects of the typeface Black-Out by Eli Carrico (released by my type foundry Wordshape), yet vertically compressed with razor-sliced counters and odd stencil element that makes up one of the legs of the “K,” the ONICK lettering is a potential source for an intriguing modular font.

Original ONICK lettering

I immediately thought of Tsunekawa Ryoichi as a potential collaborator to bring this piece of lettering to full-fledged life in the contemporary context. Based in Nagoya, Tsunekawa runs an independent type foundry called Dharma Type, including three specialized foundry sub-labels: Flat-It, devoted to display lettering; Prop-A-Ganda, a series of fonts inspired by and based on retro propaganda posters, movie posters, retail sign lettering and advertisements in the early 20th century; and Holiday Type, a series of decorative and retro scripts for holiday use.

Tsunekawa’s work has seen a flurry of notice overseas this past year, having been featured in both MyFonts’ “Creative Characters” and YouWorkForThem’s newsletter. As the work of most Japanese type designers is almost wholly unnoticed abroad, the fact that Tsunekawa was interviewed by two of the most popular type distribution companies in the world is something beyond the norm. Perhaps it is because he works independently, or perhaps it is due to the charm and friendliness with which his typefaces are infused. Either way, this attention is both welcome and appreciated.

ONICK ski boot

Beyond mere charm, Tsunekawa’s work is nuanced, detailed, and accessible due to its high level of finish. His fonts stand apart from his contemporaries in Latin typeface design in Japan due to his fascination with pop, vernacular, and historical lettering from “non-pure” sources, whereas type designers like Okano Kunihiko and Kobayashi Akira have spent years analyzing the essence of Western letterform construction and unlocking the essence of Latin forms, Tsunekawa views surface and the awkward nature of his sources as being of value, as well.

His irreverence for the formal doctrines of history imbue his typeface designs with a rugged inventiveness that would be missed by most — glyphs without source designs are guessed at and approximated, often in a manner wildly divergent from what Western eyes would assume. It is in these moments that I find sheer delight in Tsunekawa’s work and that make me most pleased to invite him aboard Néojaponisme and Onitsuka Tiger’s type development project.

Rough sketch for ONICK

His assorted typefaces show an eclecticism in finish and as holistic systems. Tsunekawa’s return email to me about the proposed type project showed a digital sketch of how a completed typeface family from the source lettering might look, rendered with an effortlessness and dedication to detail that belies a skilled craftsperson. Further development showed Tsunekawa’s rigor. The typeface in development rapidly featured glyphs ignored by many: a full set of fractions, Eastern European diacritics and accents, superior and inferior numerals, alternate characters, and custom ligatures — all designed with regulated, detailed spacing.

ONICK type specimen

ONICK is a typeface Tsunekawa should be proud of — an homage to a moment in history rendered in the absolute best fashion. We are proud to present it to the world as a series of type kits including desktop and web fonts bundled with @font-face CSS kits for immediate use.

Download ONICK here.