Design debate/spat

Interesting blog post followed by a perhaps more interesting set of comments on whether certain current magazine design strength has declined due perhaps to commercial pressures. The blog author, Mike Dempsey, suggests, for example, that the BBC's TV listings and feature magazine The Radio Times had a design heyday which has sadly passed into commercial blandness. In the comments, the magazine's art director, Shem Law, defends himself and disagrees as others join the discussion…

Blind Soccer… 2011

The Blind Soccer (or Football, depending on your nation) season is underway, and I went to see matches in the Kanto League yesterday. Above, a Nogizaka Knights player scores against Buen Cambio. For those unfamiliar with blind football, all players are blind and blindfolded (in case partially sighted) and played, 5-a-side, on a futsal pitch. In the above clip you can hear the "caller" behind the goal giving the striker the sound to aim at. It's a fast moving and thrilling sport to watch.

Shibuya

Shibuya, world famous via its crossing, an icon of Tokyo and tourist attraction, now has a tourist information centre in front of the station where you can ask for information. That face-to-face information is probably available in English. But in one of those quirks of the Japanese tourist industry, the website – where it is proudly announced that people from over 50 countries have been served at the information desk – is only in Japanese. Why do they not go that extra step and translate the simple site for people checking from abroad before they arrive? Is translation going to happen in the future? When Japan is in need of tourists, a little information for the non-Japanese speaker (almost by definition, everybody who lives outside of Japan) in English would be something of a benefit. Odd.

Hmmm…

Well, I've lived my life without being aware of Tenpyoan sweets, so I guess Disney can too. This logo works in the style of a Japanese kamon, nevertheless, upside-down it does seem remarkably similar to a certain silhouette…

Portraits: 19

Kitchens of Distinction, band, at the record label offices, London, 1991.
The band is now defunct, but this was for an album release interview. Political and non-conforming to the music industry's preconceptions, they were a band that was suited to City Limit's coverage. They were perfectly considerate, but I like the look of sheer boredom at doing an interview shot.

Eartha Kitt, singer, London, 1992
The interviewer was a little nervous – Eartha Kitt, she said, had a reputation for being, whatever the word is… "difficult". I didn't know that, so the interviewer's thoughts made me nervous too, and when Kitt entered, we both stood up like schoolchildren as much as out of politeness. Kitt was, of course, fine, only growling "Don't get too close" when I went for my usual close-up style of shooting. I suppose she could have meant I shouldn't physically get too close, but I'm pretty sure it was more to do with close-ups of her face revealing too much of the aging process! In the end, I liked this medium distance, medium format shot anyway, with her cutting an impressive figure. Eartha Kitt died in 2008. For City Limits.

For more on these portraits, see here, and the Portraits tag at right.

Design for Manga and Anime

Idea (アイデア）design magazine (left) has a "Design of Manga, Anime and Light Novel" special edition looking at various designers' work. Each manga illustration-styles predominate in the designs, of course, so it's a case of presenting that via graphical style, text styling, fonts, colour…

As always a mixed pop-art bag with some decidedly impactful cover designs among the usual surfeit of teenage-girl themed manga (mostly in a similar realm to the ubiquitous and boring real-world girl-band AKB48, but somtimes the more dicey likes of LO – for Lolita – magazine which at least only gets the two covers rather than the multi-cover spread of last year's special edition.)

Stand-outs featured include (below) Kei Kasai's covers for Hisae Iwaoka's Dousei Mansion manga, rotatable in keeping with their gravity-free space theme; Tadashi Hisamochi's book (The Sky of Longing for Memories) of backgrounds for Makoto Shinkai's anime; Yoko Akuta's cover for a sexy-looking book Utsubora; and the look back at older 20th century manga… and more.

 

 

 

You can buy the magazine from Amazon Japan

The fast, slow

Interesting shots by Appura Pai, reported over on designtaxi: long exposures of Japan's high speed rail.  (Update note: actually, just any rail, not necessarily high speed.) Never sure about using a photographer's work even to promote a link to their work, so an unusable thumbnail here, and follow the link above or to Appura Pai's flickr site for more!

TOHOKU 2011

Tonight I'll go to the opening of the new exhibition at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan of the work of member Martin Hladik, "TOHOKU 2011". Martin has made several extensive trips to Tohoku after the quake, tsunami and nuclear events. His work leeches some colour from the photos while allowing the occasional standout colour. With photo-manipulation filter additions, he isolates and focuses on elements of the photos. It's a strong effect, which with the time spent in the area and the conversations with his subjects adds an extra impact.

There's the weary tread of two older people rescuing any useful objects from their house; the orphans ritually transferring their mothers' bones after her cremation; tired firefighters standing on rubble waiting for police to remove a body they have discovered; a woman holding a ball of wool – practically the only useful thing she found in the wreckage of her house. But there's "positive" photos as time goes by since the initial events: the opening of fuel "station" (oil drums); a girl playing football; joggers running past a grounded ship.

I designed a brochure for the exhibition. My concern was to balance reality with presentation, to foreground the imagery and its artistic approach while not denying the reality its obvious, equal or more important status overall. I made a cover with distressed text after considering a fine and thinner font. The latter seemed to promote an "art" and a "niceness" which didn't compare with the content, yet the former ran a risk of a kind of horror film over-dramatisation. I played down the "damage" to the font, but preferred to go with that distressed look – there is more horror than calm reflection in the subject. Pictures were as big as possible on each page, but allowed for a caption which could at least place the people in the photo in a slightly more detailed context. And there's a grey background – white looked to "exhibition-y", black too funereal.

A small brochure, but it seemed important to give due respect in some small way via the design to both the images and the people in them.

Martin has set up a fund for two orphans, one of whom appears in a photo he took. A way of donating is online at his photographic site for the work, www.tohoku2011.com

 

News, in the world

The Guardian's Tokyo correspondent. Justin McCurry, gives a summary of the phone hacking news from the UK and looks at whether it could happen in Japan in the latest Foreign Correspondents' Club in-house magazine, Number 1 Shimbun. So I went with the red-top design on the cover (the above image is the entire cover, which featured the red top on a black background), text-wise being supported by a serious story which nevertheless lent itself to a tabloid-style headline – Jake Adelstein's article on being attacked by the yakuza.

Beck and fall

In detail: Beck's original, above, and Noad's twist on it, below…

Nothing is exactly sacrosanct, but some things just don't need redesigning. Coca-Cola just doesn't need a new logo, however much one might see a design challenge. It applies across the creative scale: the Mona Lisa doesn't need repainting, 2001: a space odyssey may be 40 years old but it doesn't need a remake. Occasionally the unexpected happens – in my own view, Gus van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Psycho (but in colour and set today) hit some very interesting spots about film-making, and was always intended as a comment or an exercise, not an improvement.

In the design world, Harry Beck's original London Underground map (although adapted for the expansion of lines) does not need a redesign, however much of a valid student-style exercise there might be in doing that. (When I was at school, the art teacher set one task of copying a great, favourite work of art, in an exercise not of improvement but of realisation just how hard it was to achieve the original.)

So designer Mark Noad's effort at redesigning and hence (I assume) "improving" by making more accuarte the links between layout and geography, is, for me, most likely to stay on the drawing board.

But now, according to fastcodesign.com, it has created a small furore over what "design", a "map" or a "diagram" is. Renown designer Erik Spiekerman (who has designed the Berlin subway map) has both pointed out the London "map" is a diagram not a map and to say in a comment (in the above link), "The worst [maps] are those in this [Noad's] example, because it is neither a diagrammatic representation of an invisible system underground, nor a true image of London’s complex topography and its transport connections."

He's right about the Beck map being a diagram, not a map, but perhaps a little too literal: one definition of a map includes "a diagrammatic representation of an area…" and most users would use the London Underground map as a general map (a diagrammatical explanation with direction illustrating how to get from A to B).  The accuracy to topography is essential the more worthwhile and useful a map would claim to be, of course, but centuries-old maps based on limited knowledge are still maps, even if inaccurate. And in the hands of users, simple, illustrated tourist maps are still "maps" even without exact topographical accuracy. Semantically, Spiekerman is correct – Beck's work is a diagram showing connections unrelated to exact geography – but practically it doesn't matter (to the user) as the fastcodesign.con poster above, John Pavlus, said.

However, I see Spiekerman as fully correct in his statement above about this new map not being a good example of improving on Beck's original.

Meanwhile, visitors to London might rely only on a subway diagram, but most would have a street map to compare and realise distances and relation. And Londoners also have that other bible of getting around its above-ground streets, the London A-Z map book. I personally can't see Noad's work being included in that as the tube map in the near future…

News, paper

The Guardian visualises the massive rise and (still relatively minor) dip in number of newspapers in the past 320 years.

Old school, new work

A good little read

On designer Eva Zeisel at 104 (above linked to the Wall Street Journal online), and her talk at TED from 10 years ago, below.

Via Eiko

Tradition and innovation

I went to the short-lived exhibition by Issey Miyake (at Design Site 21_21, before his show of work with Irving Penn) about the earthquake in Tohoku. Well, less about the earthquake as such, and more a support for the people and craftsmen and women of the area, because Tohoku is the area where a lot of the companies, dyers, cutters, knitters, experimenters, textile-makers that Miyake works with are based. The area has that tradition of work, and an introduction to the display of his and their work describes "tradition" as "research with perseverance" and involving innovation. A neat definition.

On at the same time, I missed the Tokyo Art Fair (at the International Forum) but you can see a review on Tokyo Art Beat.