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.

“Modernism” is such a loaded term when it comes to graphic design. For some, it’s the banal aesthetic that brought about the Helveticization of the corporate world and stripped the personality away from the non-stop barrage of advertising we are subjected to daily. To others, the term refers to something more political and innately humanist — a desire to live in a world where communications are enhanced, with the end goal of life being made more livable. Some view Modernism as a movement that had vaguely defined start- and end-points, while some view the contemporary age as being a mere moment in the continued evolution of a larger, socially focused Modernity.

Here I take a bit of both “Modernisms” and speak of the Modern from a hybrid standpoint — an observation of the moments in time when we as a global society made a conscious effort to veer away from the fussy classicism and pre-industrial struggle of pre-Modernity and set to the task of trying to make graphic design for the people. Not that this was a purely altruistic pursuit: In Japan it tended to be trickle-down, with manufacturers and retail ventures being among the first to shift their visual methodologies¹.

This is complicated by the difficulty in identifying exactly what “Japanese Modern” graphic design looks like. A dizzying number of design idioms came into play both from domestic and international sources from the Meiji Era onward, so there is no overarching visual rubric which can be easily applied to define “Modern” Japanese graphic design. Critics such as James Fraser have argued that an application of visual elements co-opted from progressive aesthetics of foreign cultures, including but not limited to Art Deco and Avant Garde movements, defines Japanese Modern graphic design. While there is no argument that forms of visual expression from abroad were highly influential (It is no coincidence that Marinetti’s 1909 Futurist Manifesto was translated into Japanese the same year it was published), little allowance is made for the myriad of other influencing factors — particularly the assimilation of vernacular advertising from both the West and the East. It was not just the Avant Garde that influenced Japaneese design.

Moreover, Japanese Modernity was just as much a self-initiated endeavor, not mere contextualization of foreign influence. To charge that the Modern shift was a mere synthesis of foreign visual elements is a simplistic misconception that has dogged the perception of Japan internationally for centuries. To pigeonhole “Japanese Modern” as merely design in Japan that aped the visual styles of avant garde movements abroad is both a disservice and a misstatement². The Modern age in Japan started well before overt Western elements began appearing in posters, matchbox covers, book covers and signage country-wide in the 1920s. During the two decades prior a movement was already well under way towards posters and printed materials featuring reductive compositions with pointed, streamlined deployment of imagery and typography/lettering.

Pre-War

Japan had a fully-formed culture of printing prior to the 1860 arrival of the first lithographic press from overseas and the founding of Japan’s first lithographic printing company in 1872. “Japan’s Gutenberg” Motoki Shōzō developed Japan’s first sustainable system of moveable type technology for printing (and Japan’s first typography school) in 1869, with the assistance of Irish American missionary William Gamble. Shōzō went on to form the Shinmachi Kappan Seizosho in Nagasaki, and his student Hirano Tomiji the Tsukiji Type Foundry in Tokyo, Japan’s first true type foundries. Both were innovators in creating multiple sets of type and introducing movable Latin types into the Japanese printing industry. The Tsukiji Type Foundry provided lithographic and typographic printing services as well as layout services, printing a number of books in both English and Japanese that looked at Japan as subject³ prior to 1903.

1904 advertisement for the Tsukiji Type Foundry

Integrated printing, design, and typographic services proliferated around the turn of the century, most notably in the formation of Shueisha (later the Dai Nippon Printing Company) in 1876 and the Toppan Printing Company in 1900. Both of these companies still dominate the contemporary printing industry in Japan. These companies’ initial rise, along with the peak of the Tsukiji Type Foundry’s influence in the beginning of the 20th Century, helped create and form public conceptions of graphic design as a pro-social activity that holistically engaged all aspects of commerce. Design departments at the Mitsukoshi and Takashimaya department stores opened in 1909 and 1912, respectively, each providing promotional advertising with streamlined visual messaging that showed an economy of form and directness in consumer appeal that can only be described as “modern” — free from visual frippery, excess ornament of earlier times and direct, to-the-point advertising copy.

Sugiura Hisui, "The Only Subway in the East". Color lithograph, 1927.

Ironically, it was this incorporation of design departments that would lead to the rise of Japan’s first “design stars,” most notably Sugiura Hisui, chief designer for Mitsukoshi and a member of the editorial committee of Gendai Shōgyō Bijutsu Zenshū (The Complete Commercial Artist). This was Japan’s most important graphic design publication at that time, providing commercial art and design in all its forms from both Japan and the world. Individual volumes focused on one or more disciplines, including poster design, advertising, package design, shop signs, billboards, flyers and broadsides, page layout and design, and typography, as well as other related subjects. Each edition was replete with substantial explanatory texts, profusely illustrated, and had many color plates reproduced within. Hisui would later go on to form the Shichinin-sha, an independent design research group that focused on applied typography, the effect of color, and the economy of visual style, as well as producing an annual poster exhibition.

Japan’s second notable graphic designer Yamana Ayao established himself at a young age, designing and illustrating covers for magazines like Josei (Woman) and Kuraku (Joys and Sorrows) for the publisher Platon, as well as earlier designs for his self-initiated journal Chocolate while attending university. Ayao departed Platon to join the cosmetic company Shiseido’s design department at the end of 1928. At Shiseido, Ayao defined the company’s early house style — a tendriled, Aubrey Beardsley-influenced illustration-driven series of advertisements and publications that focused on slightly abstracted female forms, delicate gothic lettering, geometric elements, and arabesque calligraphic flourishes. In two scant years, Ayao became Japan’s first full-fledged graphic superstar, jettisoning his employment at Shiseido (though returning sporadically throughout his career) to take up the gauntlet at assorted design departments throughout Tokyo.

The decade prior to Ayao’s initial time at Shiseido brought an onslaught of assimilation of distinctively foreign elements into Japanese graphic design⁴. Mirroring the European avant garde’s search for a streamlined purity of visual expression, the form of kanji and kana would be subjected to both hyper-decorative and ultra-reductive tendencies at the hands of designers.⁵ Foreign-designed avant garde art and design books were easily available from the early 1920s through 1938, most notably in Tokyo from Kaiser, a German bookstore in Kanda and the nearby book retailer Sanseido. Each stocked the renowned German design periodical Gebrauschgrafik alongside a wide array of exhibition catalogs and photography annuals from around the world. Soviet art and design publications were available from Nauka, a bookshop in Jimbocho that still exists today.

Gendai Shōgyō Bijutsu Zenshū.

Gendai Shōgyō Bijutsu Zenshū.

Foreign and domestic application of design trends and theories were catalogued domestically in periodicals like Gendai Shōgyō Bijutsu Zenshū and the intensely Modern-focused Kōkoku-kai (Publicity World). The latter was a diverse commercial art journal that mixed dynamic multi-color illustrations of lettering, page layouts, signage, and proposed kiosk designs with halftones imagery of graphic design, interior design, and architecture from abroad. A pronounced influence from the Russian and German left is evident in all three of these publications, as well as lesser journals such as Belarto, a short-lived art and design journal whose operations began and ceased within the span of one year — 1933. Just a few years later, these modes of graphic design were actively discouraged, leading to the imprisonment of a handful of leftist graphic designers who refused to convert to the state-approved style — a less architectonic, yet still Avant Garde-influenced amalgam of traditional and progressive design styles.⁶ Photo montage still had its place, but the notions which informed leftist designers and (some of) the style’s early deployment in Japan were displaced with the hardening national ideology of Japanese Imperialism.

Post-War

With the nations’ ideological and political teeth pulled immediately after the war, the citizens of Japan set to rebuilding the nation’s economy. This story includes Kihachiro Onitsuka, the founder of Onitsuka Co., Ltd. and the graphic designers, typographers, and printers who would help shape global perception of his brand.

From its formation in 1949, the story of Onitsuka Tiger is one that is based on innovation in the development of footwear, starting in the years immediately following World War II. The company’s printed promotional materials consistently kept abreast of larger trends in typography, both technologically and aesthetically — the two innately tied together. What drove the look of Onitsuka Tiger up to the 1980s was what was possible with printing technology, alongside then-contemporary typographic development and aesthetic taste.

The 1950s were a time of monumental change in graphic design in Japan. It was the defining decade in elevating both the social and economic status of the designer in Japanese society.

This was due to two primary events:

1. Peace brand cigarettes packaging redesign project

   French American designer Raymond Loewy’s 1952 redesign of the packaging for Peace cigarettes⁷ was a return to graphic form for the Japanese tobacco market after wartime shortages of both cigarettes and associated colorful cigarette packaging. What really caught the public’s attention was Loewy’s design fee for redesigning the ubiquitous brand. Unheralded in any sector of graphic design in Japan, the project fee for Loewy designing the packaging was a crisp ¥1,500,000 — a fortune at that time. The sheer amount had the nation atwitter and instantly skyrocketed public opinion of the work of commercial artists. Graphic designers and illustrators saw an increased perception of value in their work, as well as a noted increase in design fees in the years immediately following the Peace re-branding project.⁸

2. Graphic ’55

   Graphic ‘55 was the first internationally recognized exhibition of Japan’s top designers at the time. The seven Japanese designers who exhibited were Yusaku Kamekura, Yoshio Hayakawa, Hiromu Hara, Kenji Ito, Takashi Kono, Ryuichi Yamashiro and Tadashi Ohashi. American Paul Rand exhibited alongside the Japanese designers, being the preeminent designer for the global business sector at that time. Held at the Takashimaya department store in 1955, this massive exhibition helped introduce graphic design⁹ as a term and a profession worth pursuing to the general Japanese populace. Exhibitor Kamekura had traveled to the United States the previous year and there met Paul Rand, inviting him to participate in the planned exhibition. Rand gracefully accepted, and his loose, soft-focus American take on European Modernism would serve as an inspirational touchstone both for the Japanese public who attended the exhibition (much of whom were unfamiliar with his work and burgeoning profile in the American corporate world) and for his fellow exhibitors, most of whom stuck more-or-less to a visual template engineered by Rand (and his predecessor Loewy) of geometric abstraction and simplification coupled with pop typographic simplicity in their output for the remainder of the decade.¹⁰

The Graphic ’55 exhibition helped the public associate iconic advertising imagery with individuals, enhancing their social recognition and allowing the designers involved to incrementally increase design fees. The exhibition included a range of design project formats, whereas earlier domestic graphic design exhibitions tended to focus on a sole format — the poster — and showed the public the range of works that designers could tackle.

Onitsuka Tiger

232 kilometers south in Kobe that same year, Onitsuka Tiger launched their own piece of highly memorable graphic design — a lavish product catalog that equalled the quality of the designers involved in Graphic ’55. Featuring a four-spot color cover printed by lithograph depicting reliefs of ancient Olympian athletes accompanied by geometric Latin and Japanese hand-lettering, the catalog evinced a sense of athleticism and commitment that resonates five and a half decades later. This catalog sets the tone for Onitsuka Tiger’s early graphic house style — visual interpretations of authenticity and sportsmanship rendered with a high degree of craft and artfulness.

1957 Onitsuka Tiger catalog

The company’s early catalogs were a melange of pre- and post-war influence, featuring a painterly style of illustration for their covers, with text hand-lettered or printed via letterpress. A number of the covers use the hazy gradated style that was popularized prior to the war by Takashi Kono for Nippon Magazine (prior to his conversion to a more simplified means of representation). Thin-line lettering that mirrored Hamana Ayao’s art nouveau and “moderne” takes on lettering adorned many of the covers alongside geometric Latin and Japanese lettering, tasteful mincho hand lettering, and Raymond Loewy-esque “streamlined” lettering which was just coming out of vogue in the United States.

1958 catalog

1959 catalog interior

1959 catalog interior

Onitsuka Tiger’s 1959 Spring Catalog is of note for the juggling of similarly-weighted but ultimately mismatched typefaces that betrays the lack of metal type that their printer/typographer had on hand, printed in black over expressive verdant green crops of halftoned images of sportsmen. The catalog’s interior deploys an odd mix of faces — one spread juxtaposes the combination of Franklin Gothic for the headlines, Bernhard Gothic Medium for the subheads and Century Schoolbook for the text on the left side and Futura Black for the headlines, Cheltenham Bold for the subheads, and Stymie Light for the text with reproductions of a hastily written “Tiger” in the mix sporadically. This array of typefaces is in large part a history of Modern type history in Europe and the Americas, and more surprisingly, the nexus of labor by three men who defined the development of graphic Modernity through their work.

The Rub-Down Era

The 1960s saw a giant shift toward more free-form layouts globally, with dry transfer rubdown lettering freeing designers from having their layouts translated into metal grid layouts by typographers at printing companies, instead opting to paste up layouts and have them reproduced photographically. 1963′s Onitsuka Tiger golf catalog brought a switch to rubdown Letraset lettering for headlines, indicated by wavering baselines and slightly skewed letterforms, set metal type in English and Japanese for body text, and purely photographic reproduction of complete layouts. The subsequent 1963 full product line catalogs also deployed Letraset for headlines with an ATF typewriter-style typeface with halftones images on the interior. The full catalogs’ covers featured awkward hand-lettering that mimicked the forms of Helvetica Medium. Each catalog was reproduced using black and one spot color, offered in a handsome collection of four stylistically unified brochure-style pamphlets of uniform size and layout.

1964 Onitsuka Tiger catalog

1964′s catalogs continued in much the same vein on the interiors, and opted for a calligraphic titling treatment for the Winter Sports Shoes Catalog. One notable shift was a switch to using gothic typefaces for Japanese for almost all catalog interiors, reserving mincho deployment for their golf promotions where the company felt a more traditional look would serve consumers’ opinions about the company.

1967 Winter catalog

1967 brought the first use of the typeface Compacta which would be a continued, though sporadic, visual identifier for the brand’s printed matter through the late 1960s. Compacta was designed by Letraset’s Fred Lambert, adapted from an anonymous German student alphabet made from cut paper that appeared in the 1952 book Hoffmans Schriftatlas by Alfred Finsterer¹¹. With its inherent vertical thrust and machined appearance, Compacta was a logical choice for the company — it looked both serious and fun.

Information graphics in 1969 Onitsuka Tiger catalog

Onitsuka Tiger’s 1969 catalog saw use of two-color information graphics very much in the style of Austrians Otto & Marie Neurath’s Isotype¹² stylized graphic devices used to help illustrate social statistics and signage in pictorial form. This foray was Onitsuka Tiger’s first investigation into information graphics in a meaningful, thorough way for their printed matter. Olympians who used the company’s shoes, production statistics, market segmentation and market growth were all depicted in bold red and black in a manner that harked back to Isotype, as much as the rounded corners of then-contemporary style in the Onitsuka Tiger family tree of Olympians on the back inside cover of the catalog. It was a bold move, backing up what had previously been the mere atmosphere of the Olympic spirit with numbers interpreted both graphically and with acumen.

1972 Onitsuka Tiger catalog

In this way, the company’s 1972 summer catalog is related — products were photographed in full-color against poster backdrops designed by German Otl Aicher for the Munich Summer Olympics, Aicher being a champion and master of information graphics and of stylized pictographs.¹³ By adopting the 1972 Summer Olympics as the visual language of the company, for the first time a purity of the visual language of Modernism as a unified, totalizing force was applied directly to Onitsuka Tiger’s printed promotions.

Aicher’s designs for the Olympics were a heady mixture of considered color¹⁴, refined form given shape through Aicher and his team’s solarized spot-color promotional poster imagery; economic creation and use of information graphics (most notably through devising a unified system of pictograms which resonate strongly today); and confident inspirational abstract geometric compositions and nuanced typography (Helvetica seeing one its brightest days in the sun in the Olympic identity program). By merely using Aicher’s posters, using a Helvetica clone and a stylized bifurcate kana headline display typeface to capture the spontaneity of Aicher’s designs, Onitsuka Tiger connected their brand identity to one of the strongest identity design projects in history, positioning the brand as a confident and connected internationally to exuberant, intelligent graphic design. Aicher’s body or work and writing stands as a milestone in graphic design history, emphasizing finished form-making, a dedication to communication, and a commitment to “thinking while making,” formal results being based on synthesis and an iterative process in lieu of easy “visual solutions” planned from start-to-finish with a minimum of “roadside” consideration.

ONICK ski boots brochure

The five years that followed (and preceded Onitsuka Tiger’s dormancy as a standalone brand) would be dominated by technological innovations in their footwear and a slickness in graphic representation applied to both products and promotions alike. The pinnacle of the company’s efforts would occur in 1973 with a brochure for the ONICK ski boots, a revolutionary product that included a lemon-shaped hand pump called “The Air Lemon” that would pump air into a bladder which helped heel and ankle support. Emblazoned on the sides of the boots and on the brochure cover was a piece of swollen extended display lettering with razor-thin counters that mirrors the best original alphabets offered by Photo-Lettering, Inc. — the then-king of custom lettering who dominated the stylistic era of 1970s graphic design alongside the output of Herb Lubalin and his associates at assorted design and lettering ventures. The ONICK mark’s confident originality was accompanied by a host of similarly designed photolettering branding for Onitsuka Tiger projects like AFTER BOOTS, a line of exceptionally furry post-ski session luxury boots with vibrantly-colored stitching and an aerodynamic hand-lettered logo that combined rugged slab serifs with truncated swash elements and a photo-lettering outline treatment graphically.

4-3-2-1 (or How Switzerland Ran Over The World With a Graphic Truck)

The 1974-1975 catalogs of Onitsuka Tiger’s products would be in step with the Heveticization of the rest of the corporate world that had been in progress for nearly two decades prior. This move was emphasized globally by design firms such as Chermayeff & Geismar and Massimo Vignelli’s Unimark and their assorted total branding programs for companies like American Airlines, Knoll, and 3M. Developed in 1957 by Swiss foundrymen Max Miedinger and Edouard Hoffma and further developed by a number of type foundries and type designers, Helvetica (née Neue Haas Grotesk) would become the graphic lingua franca of the corporate world. Due to its clean, neutral nature, Helvetica was believed to be both timeless in nature and neutral in tone, offering typographic information in a sober, practical manner¹⁵.

1974 Onitsuka Tiger catalog

These two years of catalogs utilize Helvetica arranged on a thorough, considered typographic grid with considerable white space surrounding the type and typographic pages offset with full-bleed photographs on opposing pages in spreads. They are both the most masterful of the company’s printed matter dating to that time and also the most toned-down — the overtly professional appearance overriding the spontaneity and idiosyncrasy that had been a hallmark of Onitsuka Tiger’s identity since day one.

Of note are two particular Onitsuka Tiger initiatives that dodged the Helvetica bullet: the 1976 EMPEROR golf products catalog and the entire range of catalogs for Onitsuka Tiger in 1977. Both were inspirational in their use of color and bespoke lettering.

1976 EMPEROR golfing products catalog

1977 Onitsuka Tiger Cycling Shoes catalog

The logo for EMPEROR, Onitsuka Tiger’s line of golf footwear and accessories that was issued from the 1960s through the early 1970s (originally with the name of GOOD SHOT) is a unique bit of hand-lettering that fuses the sensibilities of Ed Benguiat’s interpretation of a Caslon for International Typeface Corporation (while simultaneously predating it) with the swashy features of a cancellaresca bastarda, then adding an extreme italic slope and a very ambitious “MP” ligature. Viewed through the contemporary lens, it’s a horsey piece of lettering that lacks finesse, but one cannot deny that it is interesting and adventurous. Within the EMPEROR catalog, products are shot against a backdrop of steel tubing, and this same backdrop is utilized again in all of the company’s 1977 catalogs for the photography, though paired with the typeface Neil Bold, an incised extra black display sans serif and favorite of later Blue Note Records releases and science fiction novels.

Conclusion

Throughout the first era of Onitsuka Tiger, the brand showed a continued commitment to the classical nature of sport, as well as keeping the company aesthetically contemporary. The evolution of the company’s aesthetics mirrored the ambition of the people who were behind the development of the most progressive sports shoes in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Onitsuka Tiger’s printed materials are a typographic goldmine and help tell the tale of their time, one of immense change.

¹ The focus is even more myopic — I am looking at typography, a subset of graphic design, filtered through the lens of application by a sole company, Onitsuka Tiger, a Japanese company with an at times firm, at times tentative, foot in the North American and European markets, as well.

² Something that has been actively taken up both abroad and domestically.

³ This self-awareness and self-analysis of nation is a key ingredient in what can be defined as Modernism: the recognition of nation precedes socially progressive trends of thought that affirm the power of human beings to create, improve and reshape their environment with the aid of practical experimentation, scientific knowledge or technology.

⁴ The Japanese graphic design work informed by foreign elements of the two decades prior to World War II is continually collected today, reprinted in cheap volumes by publishers like David and Seigensha.

⁵ The orthography of the Japanese visual language would be called into question time and time again, as well. 1919′s New Japanese Script, designed by Shokichi Toru, reduced the thousands of kanji and hundred-plus kana required to read Japanese down to a mere 125 syllabic glyphs, their form influenced by a mix of Latin, Cyrillic and Kana letterforms. A more adventurous attempt was made by Itto Kojima in 1886, reducing the Japanese syllabary down to a scant base of 24 characters, 4 horizontal snap-on bars that denoted inflection, and an encapsulating box to create variants of each syllable. In total, the result was a compendium of 204 characters that represented 609 different sounds.

Kojima Itto’s 1886 Revisionist Script

Shokichi Toru’s 1919 Revisionist Script

Kojima and Toru’s revisionist syllabaries are discussed in brief in Zerro, a compendium of dead visual languages that was self-pubished by Yukimasa Matsuda and his excellent and adventurous Ushiwaka-maru publishing imprint.

⁶ Of note, conversion-wise, was Yamana Ayao’s shift from increasingly Western-looking illustrations of women to more traditional Japanese-looking subjects as depicted on the covers of the first two issues of the state-approved Nippon Magazine published in 1935 and Takashi Kono’s move from a Tschicholdian use of “typo-photo” to a more subdued style of photomontage that had distinctly Japanese elements at its core for Nippon Magazine.

⁷ See more here.

⁸ Loewy’s additional projects for Asahi Beer, Mitsuwa Sekken Soft Soap and Fujiya and their associated massive fees entrenched Loewy as the most popular American designer in Japan during that decade.

⁹ The industry was imbued with the moniker “graphic design” and acknowledged as a term and specialized practice by American William Addison Dwiggins in 1922.

¹⁰ This was fine for a while, but had all of the life wrung out of it by 1959 internationally.

¹¹ In 2007, I revisited the original student alphabet and released it as Vorganger Grotesk — an authentic representation of the originator’s graphic intention, as represented in the aforementioned. It is the headline typeface of Néojaponisme.

¹² More here on the Neurath’s Isotype project.

¹³ As well as being someone run down by a car outside of his home in 1991 while crossing the street on his riding lawnmower.

¹⁴ This color palette has been referenced a number of times post-1972, perhaps most notably in Los Angeles motion graphics production company Brand New School’s redesign for the television network, The International Music Feed. A critique of that here.

¹⁵ There is little need to expound further on Helvetica here — the amount of research regarding this single typeface family is staggering. For an entertaining introduction that helps impart a sense of the development of graphic design as a visual and social culture from pre-Modern to PostModern times, I highly recommend viewing Gary Hustwit’s 2007 documentary film Helvetica.

The new fonts I designed for Onitsuka Tiger, Kirimomi Geometric Sans and Kirimomi Swash, are now available for free download on Néojaponisme.

For the past year I’ve been working on a new type design project with the Japanese sports fashion brand Onitsuka Tiger in conjunction with my online journal Néojaponisme. I sat down with some folks at Onitsuka Tiger’s office in Tokyo to pore over the company’s vast archives of print advertising from the company’s advent in 1949 through around 1977, and to draw inspiration as I pleased for the design of a pair of digital fonts that help tell the story of Onitsuka Tiger as a brand.

Looking through the hundreds of ads, catalogs, brochures and assorted other materials, it became immediately clear that there was a bigger story to be told — the Onitsuka Tiger materials span the technological and cultural development of Modern printing. The typography and graphic design of Onitsuka Tiger’s assorted printed materials provided a myriad of potential jumping-off points that span both Japanese and Western history, revealing a startling series of commonalities as well as interesting divergent moments in time.

From classical influence to highly futuristic, there is a huge gamut of interesting sources to pull from. Onitsuka Tiger’s printed promotions started in the age of metal typesetting, took advantage of phototype compositing in the 1960s through the 1980s, then entered the digital realm in the the late 1980s. As a Japanese company that marketed domestically and abroad, the marketing department had to be aware of typographic trends internationally, and this was reflected in their printed materials. From the prevalence of American Type Founders typefaces used in early advertising mixed with hand lettering to incised prototype katakana and hiragana to the Helveticization of the globe, Onitsuka Tiger’s printed matter functions as a cultural and aesthetic survey of popular styles and unique approaches to graphic design.

The two fonts created for this project are:

Kirimomi Swash

A display typeface which is rooted in both classical form and the sharp edges of photoype lettering. The typeface looks back to the historic forms of French typefounder Jean Jannon for it’s base, as well as the curved terminals and weighty serifs of the work of William Caslon. The various interpretations of their work throughout history have been applied to give each letterform presence, stability and rigidity. Sharp phototype swashes culled from the logo for EMPEROR, a line of golf shoes released by Onitsuka Tiger thirty-plus years ago have been applied to give the face a timeliness of the Modern/Postmodern era, offsetting the historical skeletal frame.

Kirimomi Swash is first and foremost a display face, and in order for it to function gracefully, a number of ligatures and alternate characters have been included. It is intentionally not designed for text setting, as that would require a smoothing-out of the most prominent elements, and the result would most likely be a typeface that while potentially being useful, would not stand out in a crowd.

Kirimomi Geometric Sans

A sans serif inspired by early geometric typefaces and the horizontal directionality of phototype text, yet designed to render immaculately on-screen and in print. This geometric sans owes a deep debt to Roger Excoffon’s 1962 typeface Antique Olive, as much as to contemporary interpretations of Paul Renner’s Futura, the near geometric rounded characters pinched and squeezed for readability.

Antique Olive’s S and s were indicative of brush track twists, having an overly large top story giving it the appearance of almost being upside-down. While many continue to question this move, as Antique Olive was meant to be the French contender for the sans serif crown being vied for by Univers and Helvetica and “failed” due to it’s strong personality, these strong nuances help convey a vivacity and liveliness missing from so much of contemporary sans serif type design. Excoffon’s idiosyncratic moves are mirrored in aspects of Kirimomi Geometric Sans – the scooped top of the lowercase i and j mirror their dotted elements; the whole face has a very large x-height; and terminals are sliced off, creating a distinctively sharp visual impression. The sliced serifs and terminals give the face a horizontal thrust that pushes readers’ eyes forward in lines of text.

Aspects of Kirimomi Geometric Sans veer wildly from these inspirational starting points: the lowercase a being double-storied, the optical “dazzle” of it’s predecessors toned down, and the entire typeface carefully kerned for optimum results in text setting. A number of alternate capitals and ligatures are included for the best possible results, including OpenType auto-substitution for all OpenType-enabled applications.

A number of pattern-making glyphs have been drawn and included in lieu of traditional typographic ornament within each of these fonts. Contemporary font technology allows the deployment of pattern elements in a regulated environment, allowing designers to control the amount of space in side bearings. When typeset and leading/line-height is adjusted, one can create smooth, even patterns, choose coloring and adjust scale quickly without having to resort to external files.

Both fonts are offered in OpenType format, the industry standard font format and will operate smoothly cross-platform. If used with applications such as the Adobe Creative Suite, users can easily access the multiple alternate characters that are included.

Both fonts also feature @font-face CSS webfont kits in the download, allowing users to deploy the fonts in lieu of system fonts on personal websites. (The webfont kits were generated using FontSquirrel, a very handy service for generating @font-face code in an easy, friendly manner.) The webfont kits include sample CSS and HTML files so users can implement the Kirimomi Fonts in an easy-to-understand way.

Download the fonts here:

Kirimomi Swash
Kirimomi Geometric Sans

The past few months I’ve been working on a new type design project with the Japanese sports fashion brand Onitsuka Tiger in conjunction with Néojaponisme. I sat down with some folks at Onitsuka Tiger’s office in Tokyo to pore over the company’s vast archives of print advertising from the company’s advent in 1949 through around 1977, and to draw inspiration as I pleased for the design of a pair of digital fonts that help tell the story of Onitsuka Tiger as a brand.

Looking through the hundreds of ads, catalogs, brochures and assorted other materials, it became immediately clear that there was a bigger story to be told — the Onitsuka Tiger materials span the technological and cultural development of Modern printing. So I will be putting together a series of posts and essays here on Néojaponisme that document both the development of the typefaces and their cultural relevance to the continuum of type design.

The typography and graphic design of Onitsuka Tiger’s assorted printed materials provided a myriad of potential jumping-off points that span both Japanese and Western history, revealing a startling series of commonalities as well as interesting divergent moments in time.

From classical influence to highly futuristic, there is a huge gamut of interesting sources to pull from. Onitsuka Tiger’s printed promotions started in the age of metal typesetting, took advantage of phototype compositing in the 1960s through the 1980s, then entered the digital realm in the the 1990s. As a Japanese company that marketed domestically and abroad, the marketing department had to be aware of typographic trends internationally, and this was reflected in their printed materials. From the prevalence of American Type Founders typefaces used in early advertising mixed with hand lettering to incised prototype katakana and hiragana to the Helveticization of the globe, Onitsuka Tiger functions as a cultural and aesthetic survey of popular styles and unique approaches to graphic design.

The two fonts created for this project are:

• Kirimomi Swash

A display typeface which is rooted in both classical form and the sharp edges of photoype lettering.

• Kirimomi Geometric Sans

A sans serif inspired by early geometric typefaces and the horizontal directionality of phototype text, yet designed to render immaculately on-screen and in print.

These digital fonts will be available for free download in the upcoming month.

An interview with type designer Kunihiko Okano

Ian: How did you first cultivate an interest in Roman lettering? When was it that you first became interested in lettering?
Kunihiko: While I was a student at Kyoto City University of Arts, I often made posters for the regular weekly curriculum. For type choices, I often referred to overseas type specimens, such as Letraset and The Monotype Type Library, but it was always hard to find one I wanted. I didn’t want to choose typefaces that would not go well with the graphic design that was already in progress. I thought it would be better to design the letters I wanted myself as I created all of the other materials for the poster – taking photos, illustrating, and creating symbol marks. Unfortunately the course didn’t provide type design or typography curricula at all, but fortunately, there was a Mac iicx with Illustrator 3 and Fontographer 3.1 in one of the classrooms. I started using it, drawing draft sketches, scanning them, and tracing them with Adobe Illustrator 3.1, then pasting outlines into the glyph box of Fontographer. I would revise outlines and apply kerning values, then generate fonts as needed. I can remember clearly when I saw a typeface I created on the screen for the first time. I could get all of the words whenever I wanted with my ownLatin typeface, so I plunged into making typefaces rather than posters. As my graduation work, I designed three typefaces with Fontographer and it won the Mayor’s prize in the graduate works exhibition.

I: What were your first steps commercially?
K: I am now working for a handful of Japanese type foundries as a freelance Latin type designer for Japanese fonts, but it took a long time to reach this position as a commercial type designer. I graduated from Kyoto City University of Arts, and unfortunately, couldn’t find that type of job when I graduated from the college. I took an examination for the postgraduate course but failed, and the economic situation there was worsening so there were few job offers. After a few months passed, I managed to get a job working for a small design office in Osaka as a packaging designer. While I worked in packaging, my love was to make logos for the packaging projects I was assigned. I had some ideas for different logos, then expanded them to font format. After working in the office, I spent my time designing typefaces every night at home. It was a very rewarding time for me. One day, I happened to get a copy of the issue of AXIS magazine that featured its redesign using the AXIS font that was exclusively designed for the magazine. It contained a small article on the background story of AXIS font. I was really interested in the article and the featured type designer, Isao Suzuki of Type Project. I emailed him and joined the type forum he’d opened on his website. After about one year of communication with him through the forum, I sent him my type design work to evaluate. He was interested in my work, and coincidentally was looking for a type designer who would be able to make Latin character sets. Akira Kobayashi, the type designer who had made the Latin character set for AXIS font basic had just left Japan to join Linotype and Suzuki had a plan to make the AXIS compact family – including condensed and compressed styles. It was a milestone in that the Axis family would be the first digital font that had width variations in Japan. Suzuki proposed that I design the Latin character set for the compact series. I continued working for the packaging design office, and after my regular work, I worked on Axis compact’s Latin character set every night, staying up until the early morning. During that time, I felt more and more that I should concentrate more on type design as a fulltime profession. Due to this, I left the packaging company and moved to Tokyo to join Type Project in 2005. It took around ten years to become a type designer, but I have no regrets. During my time working as a packaging designer, I accumulated a lot of know-how on the methods of making logotypes.

I: When did you become interested in calligraphy?
K: When I entered junior high school, my aunt gave me a Sheaffer’s calligraphy cartridge pen set in celebration. She seemed to think it was a standard fountain pen. The kit had a small reference sheet and showed an introduction on how to draw letters with a calligraphy pen that referenced ITC Zapf Chancery. I was really impressed – I’d never seen such beautiful letters before. Of course I didn’t know it was called ITC Zapf Chancery at that time. This is my first memory of calligraphy. After about a decade passed, I finally found ITC Zapf Chancery in the Macintosh and procured Hermann Zapf’s book. I wanted to know more about calligraphy.

I: How has it affected your work?
K: I learned a lot from the calligraphic method and techniques – just forming of letters, letter spacing, proper counter spacing/shaping and the necessary rhythm of vertical strokes. I learned the true relationship between pen strokes and letterforms and I always take care with that relationship when I design lettering and fonts. Unfortunately, I couldn’t continue calligraphy lessons due to an increase in workload, but I still practice calligraphy to improve my design skills.

I: Why did you choose KABK as the site for continued study (versus Reading or another type design program)?
K: I often get this question. There were some different reasons for applying to KABK. As much of my training is calligraphically-based, I wish to know more about how to develop letterforms by hand and how the strokes can be formed. I was interested in how KABK Typemedia teaches type design methods informed by the theory of writing. Second, to make digital font as a free- lance type designer, it requires not only design skills but also engineering techniques and acumen. When I made the AXIS Latin family last year, I had to do everything – from designing the letters using FontLab Studio to scripting Python to build the fonts with AFDKO. It was really tough and made me annoyed, especially the engineering process. I would have been unable to finish making the AXIS Latin family without some engineers’ help. I’d heard that the KABK Typemedia curriculum covers not only design skills but also engineering techniques such as programming and engineering processes. Some of the professors have developed font tools, and I thought that I should give myself the chance to learn these things. And last, I’m curious about the Netherlands. Few years ago, I got the Jan Middendrop’s remarkable book Dutch Type. I was very surprised to find that the Dutch had such a great history of type design and versatility of typographic form. The Netherlands generate such great design work and architecture, and I’ve always loved to see Dutch art, from Rembrandt and Vermeer 16th century still life paintings to Miffy (incidentally called “Usako-chan” in Japan) by Dick Bruna. I’m really interested in watching design work and fine art, and want to live in the Netherlands to get to know its culture and design more deeply.

I: What are you working on presently?
K: I’m going on making Latin parts for some Japanese type foundry but I’m afraid I can’t say anything about it due to client confidentiality, though it will bereleased next year. I am currently collaborating with Yoshihide Okazawa of Yokokaku, who previously worked for Jiyukobo, making a limited character set typeface (Japanese Kana and Latin alphabet only) to replace an existing Japanese font with a full character set. Our collaborative team is gearing up to promote this bespoke font and customize fonts for companies. If any companies overseas are seeking to open a Japanese branch, we welcome inquiries for custom Japanese fonts to complement corporate Latin font aspects of branding.

I: Chris Palmieri and I were recently interviewed by Web Designing magazine about @font-face and the future of fonts for the web. We were asked which Japanese type designers we thought would contribute most to shaping screen-based letters and creating fonts for the web with improved readability. Right after we were asked, Chris and I just looked at each other, nodded, and said “Kunihiko Okano” simultaneously and unequivocally. Have you thought much about designing fonts for screen?
K: I think screen-based media has infinite possibilities for displaying lettering and fonts dynamically and has a lot of unrealized potential. That doesn’t mean that a screen media is superior to the other media, as every media has specific intrinsic merits and characteristics. I continually hear people argue as to which media is better – screen or paper, but I think this is nonsensical dispute. I’m glad that you said my name but there are other, more innovative foundries more likely to develop type for screen-based media. Of course, that being said, I hope to be a type designer who contributes to type for screen media.

I: What correlations do you see between designing fonts for screen and the Driver’s Font project?
K: I have to say this is not solely my project. Driver’s Font was directed by Type Project in collaboration with Denso. I was just one of the project members when I was working at Type Project. The most remarkable feature of Driver’s Font is that the letterforms change based on the driver’s position and car speed. This function would be unable to work without using screen devices and it’s a great example of finding needs that previous media couldn’t accommodate. In this way, I believe we will develop new fields and appropriate fonts for increasingly sophisticated screen-based media. If you’d like to learn more, please check AXIS magazine vol.136.

I: What were your goals with Shotype Slab?
K: This font is originated from one of my graduation works. I’ve been designing this typeface for more than a decade. The Shotype Slab family is designed for magazine, advertising and packaging use. I hope to finish it as soon as possible and submit to type foundries/distributors overseas for retail sale at some point.

I: The Axis type family is considered by many to be the best current Japanese gothic font on the market today – what were your contributions to the Axis family?
K: After the AXIS compact family came out, I proposed to Suzuki that I make an AXIS Latin Pro family, as I felt that Japanese designers needed to have italic, small cap, and old style figures to set Latin-based texts with proper typographic aesthetics. With the rapid progression of internationalization and development of the Internet, we need to provide graphic design in Japan that covers Japanese and other countries’ languages in an integrated format.The result is that the AXIS Latin family is the first independent Pro Latin font set which came sprang forth from a Japanese font.

I: What are your favorite Japanese typefaces?
K: My favorite Japanese foundries are Jiyukobo and Type Project. In my opinion, they have completely different styles and activities. Jiyukobo aims for conservation and Type Project shoots for innovation. These two are the leading companies in Japanese type design, particularly in terms of design quality. I’m proud of having had opportunities to work on projects with both foundries.

I: What are your top 5 favorite Latin typefaces?
K: My top five favorite fonts will change in time. Currently, they are Trinité, DTL Dorian, FF Clliford, Mantinia, and FF Quadraat. Though, I’m sure the list will change soon.

I: What are your hopes for the future? What would you like to be doing in 5 years?
K: For starters, I’ll join the KABK Typemedia 2010/11 class this September. I hope to get great experiences and find some clues for the next stage in my progression. I hope to contribute to improving the design quality of Latin character sets within Japanese typefaces. Also, within these next five years, I hope to make a full Japanese font with Okazawa, then release it via Shotype.

This interview with Kunihiko Okano was conducted by Ian Lynam end of July 2010 in Tokyo for Slanted Magazine.

“If someone designs an original typeface … they don’t invent new letters; they invent new shapes for letters that we understand only because they are so similar to the shapes of letters that already exist. It is not so much the particular shapes that are important, but rather the ingenuity of the letterforms in the context of all the other letterforms that existed before, and the meaning or significance they convey in that context.”
– Mr Keedy, 2004

The work of Okano Kunihiko (岡野邦彦) and Ohara Daijiro (大原大次郎) represent wildly different approaches to typography, though each is a master craftsperson at creating original contemporary letterforms inflected by conceptual and formal lettering from the past. Little seen outside of Japan, their work represents a new guard of typographic designers filtering into the Japanese mainstream.

The AXIS font family, much of which is the work of Okano, is the typeface family utilized by Apple, Nintendo, and Mazda to express the brands’ typographic voices in Japan. NTT Docomo, the largest mobile phone carrier in Japan, also utilizes AXIS as the default typeface for their handsets. Despite the contemporary styling of the AXIS Compact family, whose Latin forms follow the formal evolution of humanist sans serif typefaces such as Frutiger and Myriad, Okano is no mere default Modernist. His work exercises multiple perspectives — the chopped terminals of punchcutters, deep ink traps of the 1970s and 1980s, and exaggeratedly differentiated counterspaces enhance readability with one foot in the past and one solidly in the present. Okano’s typefaces move your eyes- some almost somnambulantly in their refinement, while others insinuate a rhumba, moving optics along in steady, surprising succession.

Okano’s logotype work operates in different terrain, often that of contemporary nostalgia — a national obsession with better days (given form via the 1995 movie Always – San-chôme no Yûhi — a gauzy, soft focus look at the post-war obsession with the automobile and the electric conveniences freshly offered to the general public at that time). While in no way overt, many of Okano’s works mine history for aspects of their base forms, then update them with the sharp angularity offered by an incisive sense of the contemporary. Okano is no retro revivalist offering up readymade solutions: his work is that of one who understands history, then synthesizes and sublimates the lessons of the masters into brave new form.

The work of Ohara Daijiro meanwhile represents a near-polar opposite in his reverence for the untrained, though channeled with precision in his use of bubbly cartoon lettering, art nouveau-esque display types, and roughly-rendered geometric characters. The past century collides in his work in a visceral way, bleeding dot gain and the uneven tones of cheap reprographic technology. Reminiscent of vintage candy shops, low-budget U.K. psychedelia, and reverberating with the echoes of the ’60s and ’70s small press in Japan, Ohara’s work retains bits of the innocence of the work in Graphic 55, the island nation’s first full-fledged graphic design exhibition. These assorted strains of influence are mixed with a hand-wrought tactility that is innocent and playful, yet craft-centric in its thoroughness and richness of form and finish.

Ohara’s designs for pop band Sakerock mimic their continuation of the values and sounds of late ’80s indie music in Japan — the past reverberating into today through their work alongside stalwarts like Kicell, Your Song Is Good, Zainichi Funk, and Mu-Stars. There is no denying the strength of musical communities, especially when paired with visual execution in step with melodic vision.

Rhythm is very much the base of good lettering and typography, and this is where Okano and Ohara’s work connects: Each is creating patterns of work that keep time in ways that are reliant upon history while being very much original compositions. Each will be remembered as being part of a continuum — creative ‘fellow travelers’ who have created applied visual form filled with meaning.

* Originally published in the German typography quarterly Slanted #11 along with the first in a twelve-part primer on Japanese typography to be published in book form at some undetermined future date.

Walking through my neighborhood, Hatagaya, I get a daily reminder of a dead part of the American typographic and linguistic lexicon that has died in the West, yet is alive and well in Japan. This, dear readers, is the screamer- an oversized, extremely italicized exclamation point.

Popularized in the 1920s and 1930s, screamers were cast separately from standard typefaces, and deployed in newspapers for added visual emphasis- punching up headlines and advertisements alike.

In remembrance of this aspect of typography deceased in Western typography, though very much alive in the Japanese typographic signage vernacular, Néojaponisme and Wordshape offer a set of screamers for our readers free of charge.

In 1926, at the request of Barnhart Brothers & Spindler, the foundry he worked for, American type designer Oswald Bruce Cooper designed a wide selection of screamers that included left-tilted (back-slanted), upright (normal) and right-tilted (italicized) versions. The designer of the wildly popular Cooper Black typeface, Cooper was a much sought-after force in the pre-Bauhaus world of graphic design- a creator of work that was both idiosyncratic and communicative.

The foundry rushed the screamers into production, much to Cooper’s dismay. Cooper was disappointed with the final form of the screamers– they were designed in assorted weights to match the assorted series of typefaces that Cooper had designed, as well as in a variety of other formal options: squared-off, incised, wavy, Tuscan and rounded.

Cooper’s working design methodology was to redraw his projects a number of times in order to refine the formal results. However the screamer project was hastily cut by the head of BB&S’s matrix engraving room in fourteen sizes from the initial sketches. This preemptive final form caused Cooper to fire off a fiery missive stating, “Everything I draw is bum the first half-dozen times I draw it; the trouble with these is that I drew them only once!”

This typeface is the result of researching Cooper’s original drawings and series of engraved proofs for the screamers, as well as the original Screamer type specimen.

Cooper Screamers have never been available before in digital format. Cooper Screamers are part of a larger research and development initiative begun by Ian Lynam in bringing out unreleased digital versions of the typefaces and ornament of Oz Cooper. Accompanying the initiial fonts was the release of the definitive essay on the life and work of Cooper in Idea Magazine #339. Download them here.

The literature racks at Tokyo’s free clinics look exactly the same as their equivalents overseas: a rank-and-file conglomeration of pastel colors and rosy images of happy people with infectious diseases, broken up by the occasional stark, dead-on portrait photography-driven HIV booklet.

This informational booklet, more in league visually with the packaging of Escalator Records‘ releases than any sexual health literature I’ve witnessed in Japan (or the U.S.), stands proud as a breakout piece of graphic design in its category.

Have A Nice Sex, a lovely little two-color booklet about the niceties of anal sex, is a commendably gigantic departure from the soft-focus world of STD pamphleteering. A strategically-placed HIV information sticker on the front cover easily peels off the glossy stock to reveal the cover illustration’s genitalia. Inside, it’s full of irreverent, scrappy illustrations, hand-lettering, and admirable typography, all in a punky, neon green and black print job on two considered paper stocks.

Before you go and open the gallery, be warned: NSFW.

I am happy to present my selection for the first annual Néojaponisme Graphic Design Award, the booklet Have a Nice Sex designed by MMKG for Rainbow Ring here here.

Raymond Fernand Loewy will always be remembered as a pioneering industrial designer first and foremost — his automobile designs for Studebaker and the Greyhound bus. His streamlined objects, incorporating motion lines and intimating motion through their composition, are still indelible symbols of classic American design.

Loewy was born in France in 1893, having studied engineering there and serving in the engineer corps from 1914-1918. After moving to America in 1919 he began a short-lived career in fashion illustration before shifting his focus to product design. At the time “brand marketing” was still a primitive science, and the concept of “industrial design” was unknown to the big corporations. Product “design” was simply left up to the engineers. It was Loewy’s high-minded intention to turn corporate perceptions around.

Ever the self-publicist, Loewy carried business cards emblazoned with the legend “Between two products equal in price, function and quality, the better looking will outsell the other.” Perhaps not as zippy as today’s catch phrases but it did the trick. Although he ran up against incredulity in conservative quarters, he gained the confidence of more forward-thinking executives who, struggling with increased competition in the aftermath of the Depression, began to see that good design could be a selling point. In many cases — for example, that of the Frigidaire refrigerator that Loewy designed for General Motors in the 1940′s — the companies saw sales skyrocket.

His accomplishments as a graphic designer are secondary in notoriety, though just as striking. In particular, his company’s logo design for Shell Oil and the ubiquitous Lucky Strike cigarette packaging are some of the best known examples of his work that carry on today, albeit in revised form.

However, it was another piece of Loewy’s cigarette packaging design that struck a chord in Japan — his project to redesign the packaging for Peace cigarettes.

Some of the first people in Japan to acknowledge the power of graphic design were the tobacco merchants in Meiji era Japan. From traditional woodcut print packaging to packaging utilizing elaborate design work and fine printing techniques, tobacco products from numerous merchants competed wholesale for public appeal. Coinciding with a marketing battle came an increased monopoly on the manufacture and sale of tobacco products — an increasingly limited number of companies offered their wares to the public in ever more elaborate packaging.

This came to a halt in the 1940s as World War II saw cigarette packaging become more reductive in both design and printing quality.

Loewy’s 1952 redesign of the packaging for Peace was a return to form for the Japanese tobacco market. Pre-war images of happy children and fireworks were eschewed in favor of an iconic, though oddly positioned geometric rendering of a dove in Loewy’s steamlined style. That the bird appears to be plummeting instead of flying upward is an odd stylistic choice, however it was elegantly rendered and the package has remained virtually the same since its inception.

What really caught the public’s attention was Loewy’s design fee for redesigning the ubiquitous brand. Unheralded in any sector of graphic design in Japan, the project fee for Loewy designing the packaging was a crisp ¥1,000,000 — a fortune at that time. The sheer amount had the nation atwitter and instantly skyrocketed public opinion of the work of commercial artists. Graphic designers and illustrators saw an increased perception of value in their work, as well as a noted increase in design fees in the years immediately following the Peace re-branding project. Other benefits in the Japanese workplace saw no such commensurate raised valuation, however, the elevated position of graphic design as a viable and valuable cultural practice through increased budgets for design was a boon for Japanese graphic designers.

It is worth noting this footnote in history in hopes of prominent designers working in Japan and abroad for the Japanese market making an effort to push both for an increase in client budgets and for a subsequent public disclosure of design fees. In a country where good design is considered both essential and integral to project success, design fees are estimated to be one-third to one-half of their analogs in North America and the Continent. Simultaneously, the social status of design workers continues to rise as the Japanese public becomes increasingly design-conscious and sophisticated in their design taste. Budgets, however, seem to be firmly fixed in place, though the global economic woes of late have taken their toll, as well.

Where is the modern-day Mr. Loewy now when we need him so desperately?