In Japan, No more...

 
Seems that this short film screened before movies in cinemas in Japan (it's a warning about not secretly recording the film and the legal consequences if you do) could be having an effect. I hadn't thought much of it, except expecting it at each screening and noticing that you don't forget it, something verified when I realised it had made its way into popular culture when a guest on a TV show mimicked that angular body movement (especially when the spotlight hits the video/human hybrid) and everyone got the reference.

Then last week I went to the cinema with a nine-year-old who turned away from the screen when it came on because watching it was disturbing and sort of scary. A good reaction, perhaps, if you want to get a message across to the next generation to not do something. Meanwhile, it's entering the culture in the way that, back in the UK and for my generation (growing up with cinema in the 70s or 80s), the music for cinema-ad company Pearl and Dean did. Try forgetting either.

(By the way, 147,000 people have watched this on YouTube. I hope it was put up by someone with access to the ad rather than copied surreptitiously in the cinema!)

UPDATE: April 18, 2010: New, ironic, version released in the cinemas

On the future of newspapers and journalism...

...and therefore of some print design.

The Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, has a thoughtful contribution here, with a transcript of a speech he gave on this topic.

The challenges facing Japanese papers are given a round-up here (in a translation from a Nihon Shinbun Kyokai article, a group which represents Japanese newspapers).

(A decline of 1 million last year as mentioned in the article above nevertheless represents "only" a drop from 51.5 million to 50.3 million. Japan's sales of newspapers are very high: according to World Press Trends quoted in this article from the FCCJ's in-house magazine, in 2007, 624 out of 1,000 people bought a paper daily in Japan.)

5 Japanese magazine covers

As a gathering of publishers in Japan collaborates to take sales online, this (perversely perhaps) seems like a good a time as any to celebrate good magazine cover design! Here's my entirely random and entirely personal selection of 5 excellent Japanese magazine covers worth noting:

WIRED: Wired Japan is no more. Wired's fortunes have revived of late, the US edition looking good again and the UK edition relaunching in 2009, but the Japanese edition remains a thing of the past. (In the digital world, the past is as far away as last year - though actually Wired Japan closed back in 1998, the year of this January issue.) This cover is an example of its smart design: mirrored paper behind an eye-catchingly placed manga stalwart Atom Boy. Clean, bright, modern, impactful - and a design-style that is missed. Art director: 木継則幸 (Kitsugi)

BT: Still publishing, BT (Bijutsu Techou) is a small-format publication about art (paperback book size, and with as many pages) which frequently has fold-outs or specials as inserts. This October 2003 issue had a giveaway enclosed in a special box cover: a plastic model of a Takashi Murakami artwork. If giveaways are the spirit of commercialism, this was a perfect tie-in. (I've no idea if it is collectable, however.) The special box design, and the shaped window within the cover-art show concept and design working together. Art director: 中垣信夫 (Nakagaki)

VOGUE NIPPON: This September 2008 issue is not one I have, but I like Vogue Nippon's decision to run the logo OVER the model faces, a reversal of the usual design 'rule'. (It did this at leastthroughout 2009, as you can see here, but the current Feb 2010 issue has the model's head over the logo - I hope they're not retreating form the rule-breaking.) It lead to some close calls as to whether it works or not, though in the end it did, and here it's definitely working. The framing of the eyes by a letter in the logo becomes part of the design. Meanwhile, Vogue US and Vogue UK both resemble something more akin to a regular issue of Elle etc. Despite Vogue's history of good covers, those two editions aren't even as adventurous as other mainstream magazines like Esquire. Leave it to the Asian (and some European) Vogues to impact with design.

STUDIO VOICE: One of the magazines that closed last year and now has a different online-only presence. It's layout and themes had become repetitive, so even if it could still have occasional design impact, it's unclear to me if that repetiton or just changing times were the reasons for readers turning away: I hadn't bought an issue for years. However, it had published for 30+ years, and let's go back to this 1991 issue as a sample: in a Japan-esque pose, Yukio Mishima graced the cover and inside spreads, in a still-celebrated Eiko Hosoe photograph. Art director: 藤木やすし (Fujiki)

KIMONO: The definition of a magazine is a "periodical" - something published at regular intervals. In that case, does this count as something else - a book series, perhaps - despite it's magazine look, feel, size and approach? Issue 9 came out in December 2009, but issue 8 in June 2008, while this is issue 6 - from 2005. But if it looks like a magazine, handles like a magazine and is available in magazine shops, I'll call a spade a spade. Its modern look at the kimono follows changing trends among fashionable wearers - a steady (or steadily increasing?) number. (More on kimono in a later post.) Uncluttered even with its handwritten text, stylish, with just the right forward-looking approach to it's new tradition. Art director: 高木千寿 (Takagi)

Recycle your phone - anime

In an attempt to promote mobile phone recycling - among the younger generation with this promotion, presumably - the Japanese government have launched a YouTube anime. Catchy, or would you throw it out along with the phone?

I have never recycled a phone yet: in fact, I have all of mine stuck in a closet somewhere. Still my best-remembered for its design was an old Nokia handset bought here in Japan (with black-and-white screen - or rather black-and-green - in the days before camera were a given). Now, being a trusty (and stereotyped) designer, I have a Pantone handset.

Although of course usable here (Pantone colours, I mean - my phone obviously is), Pantone isn't the design-standard for printed colours within Japan. That status belongs to DIC. But with better promotion and therefore awareness among people, even Uniqlo links with Pantone these days.

Anime brought to my attention by Digital World Tokyo

Overheard in the newsroom - Jan 23

#2792
Copy Editor: “Somewhere there are a bunch of foul-mouthed sailors sitting around saying, ‘You are cursing like a news designer.’”

Found kanji/found fonts: 1

This is read most commonly as "kyuu" or "hisa". I liked the deterioration of this sign, especially as the kanji's meaning is "a long time".

Great

And to think I never needed one before.

Sumo colours

(Notes on Japan through design: 1 - Watching sumo)

Baseball just isn't cricket. Sumo is.

Of course, this is just from a non-participant, designer's point of view. Back in London, my apartment backed on to a small local park which had a cricket pitch. Some weekends there would be local teams playing or practicing and I could sit at home lulled by the summery thwack of the ball being hit ("the sound of leather on willow", as the cliché has it) and the various calls from players and umpires.

Baseball just doesn't supply that. But Sumo does - on television it's an equivalent background: toned down, muted, where the thwack of hand on mawashi belt (there's no cliche for "the sound of flesh on silk", as far as I know) and the non-disturbing, repetitive calls of the referee.

Football may be to football in England and Japan, but if cricket and baseball are the other national games of the two countries, they don't compare. Even if both are ball, bat and runs games, the real comparison, for a spectator from afar, is between the one-on-one of cricket and sumo. I'm talking ways-of-consuming, not sport: it's the sound, though also the tradition, the link to culture. (Even if the culture of cricket-training rarely involves death through "training", and the cultural traditions of sumo are largely inflexible, despite the fact that the top three wrestlers in the current New Year Cup are two Mongolians and a Bulgarian.) But the sound is reflected in the appearance. Run a photograph of sumo through Steven DeGraeve's automatic colour-palette maker online (go on, you know the designer in you wants to) and you get the result pictured above - complete with web-colour breakdown.

Muted colours, all earths. What a relief that the tournaments appear on the advertisement-free NHK. Such calm - and colour - is almost non-existent on commercial TV in Japan. (More on the colours of commercial TV in later posts.) As this month's tournament comes to a close, I'll miss it's calming effect.

A final 'did you know?': the four chops of the hand that a winning wrestler makes over the winning money, almost looking like a sign of the cross but in fact a blessing in another way, trace out "heart", written with four strokes in Japanese (心).

Concert

One of my photos from the Yoshimi Iwasaki and Cousin concert last night - for this concert a cappella group Bam B Crew (photographed) were guesting. I've designed most of Cousin's CD jackets since 2002, and this year will see my first Yoshimi Iwasaki cover (in March - although I designed her joint CD with Cousin late in 2009) as well as that for Bam B Crew's debut release (next month).

Selling magazines - or bags

As a large group of publishers here in Japan prepare to coordinate an online presence (as I posted a couple of days ago) to mitigate against declining sales, one type of magazine is selling well. According to the Japan Today website (reporting a Kyodo News article), certain magazines offering free gifts are doing well - with Sweet magazine, for example, doubling the print run compared to this time last year.

In the UK a few years back, give-away DVDs and CDs helped keep newspaper sales up. But here in Japan, with this successful giveaway, it's not just small-sized items attached or folded within a paper - it's branded goods such as bags and pouches. In some senses, this almost reverses the "priority" and gives away a magazine with a product (when it was a DVD or CD, even if you didn't read the newspaper, it was a paper with a DVD or CD attached, though with the likes of a Prince new-release CD it certainly didn't seem so) even if it's the magazine business which is giving away the goods.

It's one way forward to mainatain a publication, print, journalist and designer business. Not the only way yet (a researcher points out that not just goods, but specific themed magazines can sell well). A curiosity with, in one case, a million-copy print run.

Avatar - effects, colour, subtitles

I got round to seeing Avatar this week. The delay was because of the preview (which didn't appeal much) and also because director James Cameron made Titanic. Even the director of the great Terminator and very good The Abyss has to work hard to get me back in the cinema after that.

But back I went, to experience the cultural phenomenon and the 3D effects. It happily surprised me as an enjoyable film, despite many problems: among these, a limited script; Sam Worthington as a marine doesn't have the real screen presence to carry the film, and as an avatar is quite Disney-esque; lame puns like Na'vi (for Navajo, surely), Pandora, unobtainium for the precious mineral; the white guy wins the day; having to ponder how the marine and the alien had sex since, although almost nude, the aliens carefully avoid revealing any imagined body-parts. (This is a family film, and although there is a high body count in the inevitable conflict at the end, little is shown of that either.) Oh, and Sigourney Weaver's avatar looks disconcertingly - and somewhat confusingly - like Jodie Foster in Flightplan.

Weaver in Avatar, right, and Foster in Flightplan, left - in a reversal of skin and eye colour

But its heart - and the heart of its story - is in the right place. That story, despite such glitches as mentioned, ultimately just holds up. The planet special effects reveal dedicated hard work sweating over a hot computer, and imagination in both how they are made and the result. It's a special-effects landscape very fully realised. The novel avatar effects, added "live" as the actors performed, work very well.

Or at least in 3D it works reasonably well. (3D is an additional special effect in the movie - all the real imagination and work has gone into the overall look.) Just before the native fight-back started in the movie, I lifted my 3D glasses to give my eyes a break. Wearing 3D glasses over regular glasses is not that comfortable. Up until that point I'd been wondering if I could really equally share the New Yorker's unbridled enthusiasm at "how lovely Avatar looks, luscious yet freewheeling, bounteous yet strange". Certainly, it had a richly imagined landscape: but, wow, without 3D glasses it was stunning - glowing, molten colours, liquid oranges, greens, blues, appearing both "alien" and "real". For even the blue-skinned aliens - which up until then had all seemed, while superbly made, just somewhat... made - looked more seemlessly part of the overall vision. The colours leaped out at you in a way I haven't seen in a film for a long time.

Maybe it was just the welcome change after wearing 3D glasses, but I don't think so. One of the main problems with 3D (apart from any question of its necessity) is that at this stage in its development you have to watch it through special glasses, which is like watching a regular film through sunglasses. I haven't seen this mentioned much, but it must take 30 percent of the light away. (I still remember the excellent Up, for example, as a dimly lit animation rather than full of colour.) Without the glasses, suddenly Avatar's alien landscape looked glowing, bright, flaring onto your retinas, rather than the sub-marine, rather struggling light that had been apparent up to then.

I watched the rest of the movie in 2D, putting up with the double images where the 3D imagery was being formed (much of the time, though, the central focus was sharp enough) in favour of the rich colours and the "realistic" integration they helped engender. I don't know if the 2D release will be brighter - judging from the promotional stills I guess not as they are also mostly toned down. Was this part of Cameron's vision, and the brighter version is to allow for the dimming of 3D, or is there a compromise between bright and dull in the 3D release which the 2D version has been altered to match, so the film is experienced at the same brightness for either? (They can't accidentally match, the regular 2D film will have to be dimmed down to match a film viewed through dark glasses.) Personally, I'd opt - as I did for a good 20 minutes of the film - for the brighter version if such a version was released.

And a final note from Japan: the Japanese subtitles were integrated into the film. They weren't just printed onto the film (or rather into the "rendered image" as Nicolas Roeg has now referred to what used to be called "film") but given a positioning within the 3D (so that without glasses sometimes there were two, well-separated subtitles, and sometimes they merged). That seems like hard work which I'm guessing not all 3D films will manage or afford. In one scene they also move up and over objects as the camera tracks so as not to disturb imagery. More good attention to detail in a film which demonstrates much of that.

Magazines go online

The article in the Foreign Correspondents' Club magazine

Last week (Jan 8) one of Japan's major newspapers, the Mainichi Shimbun, reported that later this month (from Jan 27) a group of fifty publishers will launch a joint website which will have articles from up to 100 magazines available for a fee. It's the latest attempt, in Japan, to deal with the changing world of publishing.

Whether it'll succeed or not is unpredictable at this stage. (There'll be "experts" suggesting yes or no. But how you become an expert in the fluid field of print vs online is unclear, there can be few claimants to the title.) The "herd instinct" may help or hinder - certainly, left to individual devices there would be a number of magazines who'll fall by the wayside if the number of closing magazines in Japan - or in the US - is anything to go by. (Last year, Japan saw the end of the print Studio Voice after 30 years, just for example, as well as the imported Esquire.) Perhaps collaborating will save a greater number.

(By the way, on this subject, Huffington Post reported the closure of I.D. magazine. They've corrected the article now - a benefit of online! - but originally they got the wrong I.D., picturing the UK's style mag rather than the US's design mag. The UK's style I.D. has been going for years - though how it maintained popularity, even before the online threat to print, I've never been exactly sure.)

Mainichi is perhaps a little slow, or maybe they're just bringing out the article closer to the site's launch date - I laid out an article on the same thing in the in-house (print) magazine of the Foreign Correspondent's Club of Japan last month, written by the venerable Henry Scott Stokes. (Also online - or in PDF form - here.)

As a natural print lover and natural online user the articles do highlight a particular problem with the changing world of publishing, one I came across myself only last weekend. Browsing The New Yorker in a book shop, I found an article on Andy Warhol which I wanted to read. However, in the Tokyo shop, the import magazine was priced way too high to buy it for one article (1,400 yen = approx 14 dollars or £9.50) so I didn't buy it. (Though at it's US cover price I probably would have.) Back at home I checked The New Yorker site and the article is available for subscribers only.

The problem is, I've never been a magazine subscriber - preferring the joy of browsing and picking individual issues, even of magazines I read (or did read) regularly. That's just me: perhaps it DNA - a hunter/gatherer of magazines?! But, anyway, I didn't subscribe and didn't read the article - no magazine purchase, no online purchase, no article. I'll get by. But will the magazine? (I hope so.)

So, meanwhile, a pay-per-article solution by a banded group of publishers may be more of a solution to pick up the likes of me - a browser,  pick-and-choose reader - even if I personally would prefer the magazine in my hands. For example, I did buy an earlier New Yorker for an article on Polanski's situation - a thorough summary which I read in three stages, returning to the left magazine to pick up where I left off in any room in the house and without switching on electronics. Are such days now truly numbered?

Overheard in the newsroom...

... is a Facebook page for just that. Its overheard comments and brief conversations are read by many who have worked in newspaper (or magazine) offices. All the usual suspects of opinions/attitudes are recognisable. And many topics centre around the uncertain future of reporting... and designing.

As for the latter, I just thought I'd share one from today:
#2656 Design Editor: “I want the font that makes people addicted to reading newspapers again.”

And some of the responses:
• people still read?
• Yeah, I think we need to bring back comic sans and prove to the world that it can save newspapers so that we can give the proverbial finger to the insufferable font police. ;-)
• It's called the Internet font.
• Design can't save papers. Good journalism must save newspapers.
• Calligraphy. In Latin. Written by monks.
• would that be the "informative reporting font"?
• I think that font is called 1976.
• The New York Times has always had the most boring front page design in newspaper history, and yet it is read by everyone. Gee, I wonder why?

Hmm. Not to miss the humour (the very reason for reading "Overheard...") but just for the NYT comment, I would point out that The New York Times is designed to look that way. Hence, the award presented last October...

(And indeed, the Times' interest in reporting things such as this to its readers.)

Meanwhile, a couple of years of sitting next to the Obituaries section of The Daily Telegraph in London led to an occasional gem of the overheard.

Man on Wire (redux)

No timely connection for this (except it's just out on DVD in Japan and I watched it last night after seeing it in the cinema last year) - but none needed. When it comes to Man on Wire, it's worth a mention any time. Some works of art, some creations, manage to be about some core essential of what it means to be alive and Man on Wire (the film) manages that, in part because of it's structure and in a large part because of its subject, summed up as "man on wire" (on the arrest sheet) but so much more than that.

Phillipe Petit walked across a tightrope cable strung between the twin towers of the World Trade Centre soon after they were built. The film documents his dream, from, apparently, at age 17, seeing the planned towers in a French newspaper article while in a dim waiting room for a dentist, via the planning of the event with friends and associates - which required much effort from all in secretly casing and entering the towers as well as surreptitiously physically erecting the cable - to his final act of 45 minutes on the rope and eight crossings. But a mere summary doesn't capture Petit's evervesence and energy, the sheer gall and edginess of the whole endeavour, the small human fears and hurts of friends, and the great passion of desire for this dream.

Nor does it capture the effect of the film in not speaking of, not alluding to, events 27 years after the tightrope walk in September 2001. But that's there, in our own knowledge and imagery, in the celebration of the building's construction, in the enaction of a crime to achieve a soaring and joyous result, in the devastating shot of an airplane silhouetted above Petit on the rope, in the personal tears of one of Philippe's collaborators, Jean Louis Blondeau, which seem like they could also be tears at what is unacheivable now. As a war continues against the effects and enactors of 2001's violence, much is achieved here by "ignoring" the criminal slaughter in favour of a focus on a human achievement, in a celebration of not only one life (Petit's) but of life itself.

It's a celebration of a life that may have made-up elements of imagination (according to Jean Louis Blondeau and despite being a "documentary"), but never mind - here embellishments (if they are) are somehow still part of the piece. Jean Louis is also, apparently, planning a book about it all to include more facts. Meanwhile both his pictures, and those of another colleague in the caper, Jim Moore - which make up a large part of the startling imagery of the film - can be seen here (Blondeau) and here (Moore)

One of Jean Louis Blondeau's pictures

Energy - from a drink

A mobile phone powered by Coca Cola: a design for Nokia by UK-based Chinese designer Daizi Zheng. More at her website: http://www.daizizheng.com/projects.htm

The science of design

I've just finished John Barrow's collection of summaries of key images in science: Cosmic Imagery. There's some fascinating stuff - most definitely a book you can dip in to (or just read through, as I opted to do). Just because it's on images don't expect an easy ride: easily half the mathematics section, just for example, went over my head. Occasionally, the brief summary of complex issues can leave you unclear, or, equally, hungry for further explanation. (Black holes can be less dense than air - how does that work?) These are not "captions" to images, but explanations of how images support theories and of imagery's contribution to greater scientific understanding, as well as of the impact of a select few images solely by themselves.

It's good, from a designer's point-of-view, to see a designer in a science book: London Underground draughtsman and designer Harry Beck gets a chapter to himself for his contribution of the tube map (and its topological dissent from the then-usual travel maps). In the way of the other chapters, Barrow reveals in his text key aspects to the key imagery - in this case, how the design actually altered both the concept of London itself, as well as raising travellers' use of the tube. (Employers of quality designers should note that latter!)

Another artist also gets a chapter to himself (Scientific American artist Irving Geis), while there are looks at both artists' work and scientists' own drawings and diagrams. Among other (extensive) image selections, Barrow also includes at least one interesting take on how imagery from the arts might influence scientific ways of seeing.

Meanwhile, Barrow mentions that Beck's very first sketch for London's tube map didn't include the river Thames - an interesting aside, to the (post-publication) furore, if that's not too strong a word, over the removal of the river from the map in 2009. (Boris - the mayor - stepped in.) Personally, I'd side with the argument for the river's continued inclusion in the map (though it always emphasised the imagined "second-rank" of south London, by having so few stations below it!).

Here in Tokyo, map designers face a different scale, both of city and number of lines, which can perhaps never be resolved in the manner Beck achieved for London's underground lines. The last few years have seen the introduction of letters and numbers for stations on the Tokyo Metro - as shown in this map (and initially to aid foreigners who find Japanese names hard-going, but actually of benefit to many). But the Metro map already doesn't even include the many Japan Rail (JR) lines - apart from a thin grey dotted line for the circular Yamanote line's useful reference point - or private lines (like the one I live close to). Still, is this the best - or, almost, only - solution to different problems to those faced by Beck? After all, if you included JR lines, Shinjuku alone (midway down, a quarter of the way in from the left), which has only 4 intersecting lines on the map, would have a further half-dozen or so lines intersecting it.

Great-album-cover stamps

It's good to see that England's Royal Mail has released a selection of "great"-album-cover stamps. Good to see, yet already with an element of nostalgia, not only in looking back at 40 years of album cover design, but at cover design itself. As music is digitised the artwork is the baby being thrown out with the album bathwater. Digital downloads separate tracks from albums, and relegate covers to - well... postage-stamp size. (And that's cover artwork for digital tracks with currently still-printed CD sleeves; the future of any digital-only artwork is unclear as yet.)

Here, Channel 4 News looks at the release, including an interview with Pennie Smith - photographer of one of the chosen sleeves - admiting that cover-art is out the window. Is it mere whistfulness at the changing times, or does she, like me (an occasional designer of CD covers) not only acknowledge a change but bemoan a loss? Aren't covers just part of the "value" of the music release, while digitalising things flatten's value. Holding a good artwork - or even just an artwork - helped represent the effort in both you accessing the music and the musician's creation of it.

Meanwhile, no one will agree on what's a good choice of British album covers. Ziggy Stardust is a shoo-in, but isn't Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon better than the Division Bell chosen? Isn't Coldplay's chosen one a revamp - a good revamp, but a revamp - of Peter Saville's work with Joy Division? Et cetera. Music fans may argue the toss. But it's good to see a dying art celebrated. And good to see David Bowie given the "honour" of being the first living person - apart from the Queen - allowed onto British stamps (along with the Clash's bass player, Paul Simenon, here without his face visible)