Massive cast iron ampersands from House Industries! Insane!!!

TOKYO.TEN : EXHIBITION
2008 06.27 / FRI – 07.27 / SUN
GALLERY & SHOP “DO”
OPENING 06.27 / FRI / 7pm - 11pm
CLOSING + LIVE AFTER PARTY 07.24 / THU / 12am – 4am
URL : claska.com

This event is the W+K team’s first exhibition in Tokyo. It will showcase a visual remix of the 9 WKTLAB hybrid CD/DVD releases and feature the 42 artists who participated in the TEN project. It will also world premiere the latest WKTokyoLab music video for Jemapur’s Maledict Car, directed by Kosai Sekine.

The show is a pretty star-studded lineup of visual creators who work in Tokyo. The participating artists are:
01 ERICA DORN : JAPAN / UK
02 TAKAGI MASAKATSU : JAPAN
03 CHRISTOPHER HUTCHINSON : USA / JAPAN
04 KUSTAA SAKSI : FINLAND / NETHERLANDS
05 KENTARO KOBUKE : JAPAN / UK
06 ELECROTNIK : JAPAN
07 FIEL VALDEZ + Peter Vattanatham : UNITED STATES
08 EDWIN USHIRO : JAPAN / USA
09 SHANE LESTER : USA / JAPAN
10 FREK / OUTSIGN LAB : HONG KONG
11 IAN LYNAM : USA / JAPAN
12 PHUNK STUDIO : SINGAPORE
13 KAZUFUMI KIMURA / VJ GEC : JAPAN
14 EARL BURNLEY JR. a.k.a. JUS REP : UNITED STATES
15 FIEL VALDEZ + PETER VATTANATHAM : UNITED STATES
16 ZONGY : BELGIUM / USA / JAPAN
17 FURI FURI COMPANY : JAPAN
18 PAUL HWANG / NANOSPORE : UNITED STATES
19 DRISCOLL REID : USA / JAPAN
20 AGENCY COLLECTIVE : UNITED STATES
21 LUIS SANCHIS : SPAIN / USA
22 TOSHIKO KIMURA : JAPAN
23 WOOG : HONG KONG / USA / JAPAN
24 KAMIKAZEDOUGA : JAPAN
25 MOTOKO : JAPAN
26 BURACO DE BALA : BRAZIL　
27 TORU NAGAHAMA : JAPAN / UK
28 GENKI ITO JAPAN
29 ALEKSANDRA DOMANOVIć : SLOVENIJA / GERMANY
30 MAREK OKON : CANADA / JAPAN
31 TADAOMI SHIBUYA : JAPAN
32 MAHARO : JAPAN
33 KAMI : JAPAN
34 SASU: JAPAN
35 TATSUYA YAMADA : JAPAN
36 SUN AN : USA / KOREA
37 TADAHIRO GUNJI : JAPAN
38 SEONGHYUN KIM : SOUTH KOREA
39 THE_GROOP : UNITED STATES
40 SOLOBONGNU-SENSEI : JAPAN
41 KOSAI SEKINE : JAPAN
42 +CRUZ : PHILIPPINES / USA / JAPAN

The exhibition is in celebration of W+K’s new book and dvd release. This is a project set up so that W+K Tokyo LAB, in collaboration with all the artists with can express a range of “POINTS” (“点（TEN）” in Japanese) relating to Tokyo. A point is a moment in time, a dot, a location, and a reason for doing something. What’s the “point” or mark that makes Tokyo different? A point of view, a physical location, a point or moment in time. What do you think of when you think of “Tokyo”? What makes Tokyo special?

DVD　(total recording time 70 minutes）
The greatest hits of W+K Tokyo Lab’s artists, including Hifana, Afra, Jemapur, and Takagi Masakatsu.

Come party it up and check out the work!

Also, check out the process blog that catalogs the making of the book.

The mack daddy of type blogs.

Lately, I have had the great pleasure of becoming friends with Kunihiko Okano, a really amazing type designer here in Tokyo.  Okano-san launched his Shotype design office a few months ago, an independent design office which will quickly become one of the top firms in Tokyo. He has experience in logo design, packaging design, and is a really gifted type designer.

We met up the other day for coffee along with Yutaka Ozawa, a really skilled type designer and developer/programmer and Akira Yoshino, an editor at Kobunsha, a major Japanese publisher and frequent contributor to MyFonts.com's "What the Font?" forums.

Kunihiko is going to release a number of typefaces over the next few years that will establish him as a great new voice in contemporary type design. I was lucky to have the chance to review a number of the projects that he has been working on and refining for years. He is poised to release a number of classically-inspired typefaces that will really stand out in today's market. Personally inspired by the works of Zapf and Frutiger, Okano-san is ready to take the type world by storm.

He is also an amazing calligrapher, having trained at the MG School of Latin Calligraphy in Tokyo. Kunihiko has a sensitivity for Latin letterforms and Roman numerals that is rarely seen.

Kunihiko expanded the Axis type family to include a condensed and compressed version, adding small caps and italics to the family during his time working with TypeProject.

 If you are ever in need of a finely crafted calligraphic logo from scratch, Kunihiko Okano is the man to contact!

MyFonts is now an official distributor of Wordshape typefaces. Stroll on by to pick up the now heavily discounted Cooper Black Swash Italic and/or Rubber Vloeren.

Cooper Black Swash Italic is a true digitization of Cooper Black's swash characters which never made the jump from phototype to digital form. Most designers have settled for using the (IMHO) far inferior Goudy Heavyface swash characters in lieu of the more friendly Cooper O.G. action.

Rubber Vloeren is a digital adaption of Piet Zwart's lettering for old pre-linoleum rubber flooring advertisements. The same Rubber Vloeren alphabet was used by Zwart on several other occasions. There’s a showing in Dutch Type by Jan Middendorp of the most spectacular version: a gold-on-blue version on ceramic tiles made for the First Church of Christ Scientist in The Hague when working for the architect Berlage.

Tonight: A celebration of ten years of LOST, L.A.'s primero graffiti magazine, celebrating the anniversary and the release of the new LOST book. 

The book contains highlights of the past decade editor/designer EyeOne has spent documenting LA writing. Includes imagery by Atlas (if you haven't caught the documentary on his work, watch it now!), Pale, Cab, Haeler, and more. Screenprinted board covers, numbered limited edition of 2000.

Even if you are not a graffiti fan per se, the LOSt book is a musthave for folks interested in Angeleno culture. More about LOST here. 

LOST is a picture-perfect example of designer as author. 

Well, the first print run of Parallel Strokes is almost gone. To help move the last 200 copies, I printed up some fancy 2 color gradated canvas tote bags. Buy 2 books and get a tote free. Be nice and a poster'll get thrown in there, too.  Bags printed by Sweatshop Union, Osaka's raddest screenprinter. Well, Japan's raddest screenprinter, to be honest.

Thursday, May 1 the CalArts graphic design T-Shirt Show. T-shirts designed by design students, faculty, and alumni will be sold to raise money for the CalArts AIGA student group, for workshops, shows, and other events for the students.

Where: CalArts, Tatum coffee shop
When: May 1st, 7:30pm - 11pm

The shirts are always super-rad at this event. Go early to score new designs from famous alumni!

My book, Parallel Strokes, is available now via the book website.

Click to read more ...

I had the extreme pleasure the other night of visiting Robundo with Chris Palmieri and Eiko Nagase of AQ along with Christian Schwartz the night before last.

Robundo is a hybrid Japanese digital type foundry, type reseller, publisher, and manufacturer of really exquisite small tabletop letterpresses in the vein of old hobby presses. Riso's Print Gocco home screen printing kit is rad, but Robundo's Adana 21J is the next level tool for printing type properly at home.

Katashio Jiro, the owner of the company, is a really amazing fellow who is a treasure trove of Japanese and Western typographic knowledge. He brought out Japan's single oldest type specimen for us to check out (shown below) - a national treasure which he pulled out just for for us!

 

 

Thanks very much to Katashio-san for inviting us to come visit Robundo and for hosting Christian's great talk on he and Paul Barnes' design of the Guardian family of typefaces. The lecture was great, and meeting so many distinguished Japanese typographers was a really huge treat!!

I usually don't go in for design contests, but the guys at Underware have a pretty rad one going on. They designed a custom incised version of Fakir for the design public to use to try their hand at designing a 7" record cover for the band Orange Sunshine, a proto-metal band (a la Witchcraft/Blue Cheer/Sleep).

Winner gets 2000 Euros wirth of typefaces. With Underware, that is nothign to sleep on! Even if you don't win, you still get a copy of the record. Win-win situation. Get on it! 

Through 20 interviews with 29 key figures in the Tokyo art world and 6 essays by art specialists, Art Space Tokyo fleshes out a thorough exploration of the Tokyo art world and the issues that revolve around these spaces.

The guide is lavishly ornamented with over 50 beautiful pen and ink illustrations by Nobumasa Takahashi, bringing readers intimately close to the voices and spaces within.

Topics include:

- Japan's position within the rise of the Asian art scene
- Takashi Murakami and the relationship between contemporary art and manga/anime
changes in the Ginza area's position in the Tokyo art world
- an account of connecting with the Tokyo art world as a foreign curator
- converting subway luggage lockers into galleries
- 100 artists renovating a 160 year old warehouse
- contemporary Japanese architecture and urban regeneration in Tokyo
- the current state of Japanese art publishing and art criticism
- international art fairs in Tokyo
- the collecting of artwork and the history of Japanese auction houses
- art and performance in Tokyo's public spaces
- graffiti in Tokyo

This month over at Néojaponisme: a micro/macro look at Harajuku's place in the fashion landscape globally and locally; two analyses of what it really means to be an otaku; and Tokyo's first contemporary art fair. All this and our editor-in-chief is also having a kid!

On April 8th (Tuesday), Tokyo super-designer Chris Palmieri will be hosting the next TAB Talks, featuring a presentation and Q&A with type designer Christian Schwartz. Christian has created custom typefaces for publications and companies like Esquire, Wallpaper*, The New York Times, Bosch and Deutsche Bahn. His typefaces for the Guardian were an integral part of the newspaper’s acclaimed redesign in 2005.

The talk will be held in English with Japanese translation, at Gotanda Sonic in Gotanda. Hope to see you there!

It's been a vaguely exciting month over at Néojaponisme. We've debuted the first English review of Kawakami Mieko's 138th Akutagawa Prize-winning text Chichi to Ran (『乳と卵』, “Breasts and Eggs”), a questionable graphic novella I did years ago in Japanese, a retro review of an even more questionable Japanese submarine action thriller, talked about the northern islands ceded to Russia by Japan following World War II, dropped bootleg Cornelius radio broadcasts galore, some crappy type design, and an enquiry into Japan's attempt to reform its visual language.

There is much, much in store in the next year: limited edition clothing with a certain clothing giant and more...

If you are in LA and are vaguely interested in things Nihonesque, make sure to check out Néojaponisme Editor-in-chief W.  David Marx speaking at J-Wave at UCLA TOMORROW. A more crucial, engaging, and enlightening presentation on global fashion is going to be difficult to find.

Above: the non-LP b-side image that didn't accompany the Murakami review.