INTAPACは当事務所がイノベーション研究グループ、Five By Fiftyのために開発した、アジア地域の消費者製品とトレンドに特化した会員制のニュースと分析サイトで、世界でもっとも成長している当地域の日用消費財の発売の分析およびマーケティング、最先端のパッケージング、消費者動向、消費者行動における洞察を提供している。

このサービスでは、飲料、パッケージングとデザイン、健康、食品と菓子、国内製品、そしてマーケティング＆プロモーションからなる6つのチャンネルによって、日々顧客のニーズに合わせた最先端の商品やイノベーションに関するレポートをお届けしている。このINTAPACの依頼に際して、我々は集約的なデータベース、事前準備、プロモーション用動画などなど、様々なものを制作した。

The semester at Temple University Japan is over and went amazingly well- no one failed and all of the students worked super-duper hard. Thanks so much to my Motion Graphics and Typography students for kicking out a ton of great work!

One of the highlights of the semester was having Lesque Skateboards partner and video director Koji Asada in to show his work and talk to the students in the Motion Graphics class.

Thanks, Koji!

I’m excited to announce my new signature keitai kisekae/cellphone theme for WKTokyoLab’s mobile device shop. Kisekae are sets of images that users can download to create a holistic theme for their phone.

The theme I created for the TokyoLab music label is called “Utopia” and is based on a music video that I did in collaboration with the Lab folks for NHK a few years ago. It is an animated modular pictorial utopian vision of Tokyo in the future.

The theme is completely animated, with custom-designed icons for battery power and signal strength, a smart display that analyzes the time of day and generates one of four different appropriate images (morning, afternoon, evening, night), mail sending screen, mail receiving screen, incoming and outgoing call screens, typographically considered menus, and a ton more stuff.

In Japan, you can use your phone to browse to this address and download the theme.

Many thanks to Bruce, Yoko, and the WKTokyoLab team for making such a cool project happen!

New website for Growthlab, a Tokyo-based corporate training initiative.

東京で企業研修を提供する会社、Growthlabの新しいウェブサイト。

Two new publications out now.

First, a new feature for the latest issue of Idea Magazine (issue #340) called Forms of Practice, interviewing young designers, is on newsstands now.

An excerpt:

Toward a new form of practice

A number of young designers in Europe and America are attempting to develop their own paths in exploring graphic design through innovative small-scale practices. Many of the designers featured here were born in the 1970s and 1980s, coming of age in commercial practice in the digital environment. The majority of those featured operate within the sphere of graphic design production from the approach of a more personal practice, inflecting their work with nuanced, idiosyncratic conceptual and formal approaches.

While widely varied due to cultural context and social/environmental differences, all have a kinship in unique approaches to developing formal options for clients. The use of the word “option” as applied here is perhaps the most relevant key point for the latest wave of graphic design from abroad- perhaps the “solution” as an end result of graphic design as a process is a dead methodology. What are instead offered are graphic “options” in lieu of “solutions”- inquiries answered with inquiries, questions answered with questions. The work featured offers playful, tentative answers instead of cold, hard end results.

This issue of Idea comes with a bonus satellite publication containing interviews with all of the designers and design studios featured in English and Japanese.

Copious photos are now in the Writing section of this site.

Second, the foreword for a new book from Sandu Media called Mini Graphics, an exploration of small-scale graphic design projects.

An excerpt:

Go small.

Scale is a funny thing. Graphic design practitioners consider it daily on a relative scale- the size of a logo in relation to a business card, book title in relation to the size of a title page, or glossy button in relation to the size of the desired user’s browser. Beyond the design project itself, scale in terms of critically assessing professional practice is also valuable, especially in contemporary times- a juncture where there is such a variety of models as to what professional practice can be.

More and more, the boundaries of graphic design as a profession are widening. The potential of design as a small-scale, craft-centric practice that exploits the potential of on-demand production both in production and deployment has been more fully realized in the contemporary context. The main tool of contemporary graphic design- the personal computer- has become an increasingly affordable object to attain as of late and ease-of-use of this tool has developed more fully as computers themselves have become more sophisticated and powerful.

This tide shift in the technology and tools of graphic design and reprographics over the past decade is hugely important. Graphic design is an evolutionary process, and while it seems to move slowly to practitioners, it moves infinitely faster than other communication practices. These changes are both immediate and gradual, and they affect many aspects of graphic design- from process to product. Most immediately noticeable is how technology affects the final product. As evinced by the work in this book, graphics are no longer simplistic, unified brand signifiers rendered by previous generations. Designers today use broader palettes of color, form, space, and sheer methodology to achieve their results.

I have a number of projects featured in the book, including the identity design for my own design studio and identity projects for a handful of clients and collaborators.

You can see a number of photos of the book in the Writing section of this site, as well.

雑誌『アイデア』第340号において、グラフィックデザインの実践という新しい目玉記事で若いデザイナーたちとのインタビューが掲載された。

Sandu Mediaから発売の新しい書籍『Mini Graphics』の序文、小規模なグラフィックデザイン・プロジェクトへの探求。

A number of pieces of my writing and design are now available in Harajuku at the Zine’s Mate shop within Vacant Gallery. Info here.

British Chamber of Commerce in Japan（在日イギリス商業会議所）が発行する雑誌『Acumen』の新しいウェブサイト。