Japanese Graphic Design: Not in Production focuses on the activities of highly active designers, type foundries, distributors/retail spaces 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.

Booklet Press

A non-profit, small-scale press and independent publishing library located in Minato-ku’s Shibaura House. Run by architects Morishita Yu and Évita Yumul, Booklet is a free library devoted to small press initiatives, focused primarily on ‘zines and cultural publications.

More: http://bookletpress.org

Okano Kunihiko

A recent graduate of the TypeMedia program at the KABK in the Netherlands, Okano stands as perhaps the most nuanced and rigorous designer of Latin typefaces and lettering in Japan. His most recent typeface is Quintet, a layered script family available via House Industries’ PLINC system. Quintet demonstrates his years of experience studying the nuances of calligraphic lettering.

Kunihiko Okano’s approach represents a calligraphic-based approach that emphasizes legibility and readability in creating Latin character sets that complement the Japanese character sets for the typefaces he designs. A tireless and thorough craftsman, Okano is an unrelenting force in the Japanese sphere of typography. His work speaks for itself — graceful and poised type designs that retains the springy qualities of pen-rendering.

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 its 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 punch cutters, deep ink traps of the 1970s and 1980s, and exaggeratedly differentiated counter spaces 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.

More: http://shotype.com

so+ba

This design studio in the Kyodo area of West Tokyo was established in 2001 by Swiss partners Susanna Baer and Alex Sonderegger. so+ba is active in the fields of graphic design, art direction, and sound visualization. Both partners teach typography and design at Tama Art University.

More: http://so-ba.cc

Dainippon Type Organization

Partners Tsukada Hidechika and Tsukada Tetsuya operate a hybrid typographic design practice and product design studio devoted to typographically-themed toys. Their “Toypography” project is a system of colorful, modular curved, and straight shapes for creating Latin and Japanese characters. Their playful take on connotative bilingual lettering treatments for corporate and commercial clients is both evocative and masterful, despite veering wildly from style to style.

More: http://dainippon.type.org

Yorifuji Bunpei

Mixing twee, oddball illustration, accomplished typography and pop color schemes, Yorifuji Bunpei’s work is omnipresent throughout Tokyo. Yorifuji-designed posters for the Tokyo Metro train system adorn every station and his public awareness campaigns for Japan Tobacco dot the streets of the city, reminding citizens of the potential good manners of smoking. His large-scale worked is backed up by the design of innumerable intimate art and photography monographs for small publishers like Nanarokusha (ナナロク社), Akagokusha (赤々舎).

Yorifuji has simultaneously produced multiple self-initiated projects. The yPad is a series of iPad-sized sketchbooks filled with grids, typographic tips, and project scheduling calendars intended to help designers. His bestselling self-published books The Catalogue of Death, Master of Imagination & Drawing and The Catalogue of Unco mix quirky illustration, oddball humor, and prose with appealing, well-considered typography and design.

More: http://www.bunpei.co/

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.

“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.