I’ve been eating out a lot these days, so when I cook at home, I try to catch up on the vegetables. But without a lot of time to fuss with complex sauces or multi-step cooking, I’ve been trying to do a lot with a little.
Insipired by Eiko while she’s away.
My first article for TABlog was just published: a review of the Tokyo Art Director’s Club exhibition at Ginza Graphic Gallery, in the form of 6 suggestions.
“Award shows are tough to get right. They have no over-arching narrative, no common aesthetic, and enjoyment by the general public is only one of their purposes. But they are also a great opportunity to put the current thinking and values of an industry on display, improving awareness of how design works, and when it’s working.
The ADC and Ginza Graphic Gallery could be doing a lot more to embrace this opportunity. Here are a few suggestions on how.”
We released two and a half updates to TAB this week, our biggest push so far this year. Some design notes:
TAB T-shirt Shop
The E-commerce system is a familiar design problem for web designers. Though there are still plenty of sites that get it wrong, sensible conventions have been in place for a while. Still, when it came time to design this years TAB t-shirt shop, we took the opportunity to explore what else e-commerce could look like.
First, we did away with the shopping cart page, instead, using the right column of the site to handle the entire transaction, save a brief detour for PayPal users. Each step of checkout, which on Amazon would be a separate page, is handled using some light AJAX.
Visually, our checkout takes the offline metaphor literally, with large, plastic-wrapped product thumbnails appearing on a pixel-idealized conveyor belt, inspired by American supermarket checkout lines. The reference was lost on our Japanese users during testing (there are no conveyor belts in Japanese stores), but since it didn’t interfere with their ability to purchase a shirt, we went with it anyway.
Admittedly challenging user expectations of how familiar, critical tools should look is a risky indulgence. It required and will continue to require careful testing and refinement. In the past, it would have been hard to take the same risk with clients, who usually value predictablity over innovation, but as AQ settles into its third year, with more experience, confidence and programming power, some of our clients trust us enough to take these risks together on the way to something a little more special.
In product development, lesser manufacturers often frontload their attention onto the pre-purchase experience. Only good manufacturers care what happens once their product enters your home, and only the most conscientious care what happens once their product leaves your home.
The same can be said of restaurants. Lesser chefs dazzle you with fancy names, cheap prices or insane portions, better chefs make sure you enjoy every bite. But I wonder how many chefs consider everything that happens after you swallow?
I’m not talking about poisoning or obesity here, just the couple of hours after the meal. Are there certain cuisines or dishes that put you in the same physical or mental state, good or bad, every time you eat them? Do you modify your choices, or eat whatever tastes good, regardless of the consequences? Do you know any chefs who consider this when creating a menu?
We relaunched AQ’s website a few weeks back.
This website was long overdue. Although the old site neatly summarized what we do in 4 pages with no navigation, the flat architecture and minimal design gave our audience few visual clues on what kind of site they were looking at, how to interact with it, or what kind of people were behind it.
With the new site, we filled in these blanks, and indulged in some features that will inspire us to be a bit more talkative: a CMS, a blog, and dynamic language management.
We have a few exciting posts cooking up for the blog, so don’t forget to grab the rss feed!
Big thanks to Christophe for fighting the WP beast into bilingual submission, Eiko for the sweet illustrations, and Paul for guidance and proofreading.
I had dinner with Paul and Craig at the New York Bar and Grill at the top of the Park Hyatt in Tokyo, a planned indulgence, after a rocky start to 2007. I lost all sense of time and place. My first steak in almost a year, and I’d wait another year for the next one if I can have it there again. I think there are two reasons: First, being the client is tough work. It’s easy to take for granted how much client’s have to do to keep a project moving: gathering and editing content, scheduling photo shoots, building consensus. When we become our own clients, we are effectively doubling the workload we are used to for a website, and often chipping away at this workload off hours.
Secondly, good design projects are conversations between client and designer, who check and balance each other, propelling the project forward in the process. Without another team on the other side to volley back, you have to continually step under the net, adjust your perspective, pick up the ball and hit it back over.
While there are always one or two beauties, with the iPhone on its way, it’s become even clearer to me that the Japanese carriers release way too many phones. Their approach seems to be to split up the market into as many demographic segments as they can, and give each their own phone with it’s own brand message, form, color and feature set. This seems like a slightly more evolved variation on the “spray and pray” approach that you see with a lot of less fashionable Japanese consumer electronics, for which they long ago gave up on searching for names that don’t read like serial numbers.
Maybe this makes business sense, but it’s sure is dispiriting if you look for an aesthetic coherency from model to model, season to season.
Photo by Paul.
As far as I can tell, it’s generally considered bad manners in Japan to eat, and to a much lesser degree, drink outside.
There are of course several allowances. Anything served at outdoor festivals, quick shots of canned coffee. But outside of these, you just don’t see Japanese people put much to their mouth outside of homes and restaurants.
This makes perfect sense to me. When they can, the Japanese like to take their time with meals. They fuss over presentation, balance and sequence. There is a whole vocabulary for eating that spans past the easy senses of taste and smell, into touch and hearing. How could any of this possibly be enjoyed wedged between meetings on opposite sides of town?
Besides, in many less restrained cultures than Japan, eating is the most flamboyant bodily function that humans can engage in with mixed company. Eating outside imposes all kinds of potential irritations on strangers. Maybe they haven’t eaten yet today, so your soft bite into an onigiri taunts them. Maybe they just ate, so the smell of your everything bagel nauseates them. Or maybe they’re just having a really bad day, and the last thing they need is for you to spray droplets of melted banana java chip Frappucino onto their suit jacket while they hang from the hand straps in a Ginza Line subway car, gently swaying.
But this has been a tough adjustment for me. I survived the last eight or so years of my schooling eating chunks of bagels in the back of math class, food that requires utensils while driving, and entire fast food meals while jogging across campus. In Japan, I struggle to delay gratification until I find a quiet, stationary stage for the performance of a 3-part symphony of mixed sandwiches.
Which is why this ad in Kudanshita station touched me so. A single line of copy and a simple photograph together defy all this nonsense and make it ok again for me to inhale soft serve in front of ampm.
I received this charming businesscard from Nobi at a blogger’s meetup last night. The cards are from a Tokyo stationary shop called Winged Wheel.
Readymade graphic design systems (otherwise known as templates) are often frowned on by designers for their mediocrity, mentally shelved somewhere next to clip art and stock photography, but this card reminded me that templates offer quite a lot in exchange for having to share with strangers, and can in fact be beautiful.
Printing costs alone for a 3-color embossed card in 3 variations would be prohibitively expensive for most individuals and small businesses, expecially with staff, addresses and phone numbers changing as often as they do. Nevermind what designers like me charge for the card design and illustration/logo.
What circumstances require an entity to have a custom, unique identity, website or print collateral. Is it simply the budget to pay for it?
What makes a template successful and what are the limitations of even the best template designs?
Photo by Nobi Hayashi
Japanese print ads have always been more interesting to me than I remember American ads, though the reason probably says more about me than it does about the quality of the ads, namely that:
In addition to keeping my discretionary spending on hair gel and trashy weeklies down, this total communication breakdown has made it easier to pass the time on my commute, deciphering and dissecting these ads. But one gaijin can only take it so far, so I’ve decided to share a few cases here, starting with this series from Mos Burger.
This campaign is running on the Tokyo Metro trains to promote new recipes on Mos Burger’s core products, the Mos Burger and the Teriyaki Burger.
The train ads are as simple as you can get: a product shot, 3 lines of copy, product name, and the company logo and tagline, but let’s try to pull this apart (click on the image to follow along):
Though somewhat at odds with where these MOS ads started, with history, perseverence and reputation, this tagline is perhaps what fast food does best even if it’s for the worst. It places a solution within reach, to answer an urge from within, right now.
A few months ago, I was sitting at an Izakaya in Ginza with Paul. I was giddly, proudly sharing one of my old ura-michi finds, a quiet coffee shop in Jimbocho.
It’s not hard to fall in love with a coffee shop, but that doesn’t make the feeling any less real or personal, and I love every detail of this place. The hard, low wooden chairs that make you shift from cheek to cheek every few minutes, the muted ticking clock in an otherwise silent back room, the old maps of Tokyo on the smoke-stained walls. I brought American friends here when they were in town, had pencil-sketching dates with Eiko, and spent many afternoons alone, creating quilt-like pixel patterns for an indulgent Flash portfolio site, that once sat at this very domain, and in the end, brought me exactly zero steps closer to making a living as a designer in Tokyo.
Years later, sitting with Paul, I could sense that my story about the coffee shop wasn’t nearly as interesting for him in content (he doesn’t drink coffee) as it was in spirit, but the spirit he knew very well. He commented on how it seems like all foreigners living in Tokyo have places like this, and how these places and the moments we experience at them shape our personal connection with Tokyo. He wondered whether there wasn’t something special about Tokyo itself that caused this bubbling raw emotion, and whether there isn’t some way of sharing these places and stories that is meaningful for all the people who have, are, or dream of passing through this city.
We knew immediately the idea was exciting, but one that could go horribly wrong, veering off into soggy sentimentality or dry reviews. This site would require a clear concept and editorial discipline to get right. So we called on our officemate Craig, who just happens to make exsquisite English books about Japan and design and develop websites.
A few months and many Royal Host coffee and eggs later, we have hitotoki, a literary website mapping personal narratives about Tokyo, written by curious outsiders.
Hitotoki is exactly 2 days old, 7 stories large, and accepting submissions.
Every pixel and word of this site has been a collaboration of some sort, a privledge I don’t take lightly. Photoshop tennis among designers is not always comfortable, but, I think hitotoki proves it’s not only possible, but can result in beauty. Even the logo evolved from a sketch in my notebook by Paul, iterated by Craig, then back to Paul, before being carved in stone (literally) by Eiko.
Much thanks also to David and Bruce from Chin Music Press in helping us refine the hitotoki concept and voice. Not to make too much of it, but I don’t think it a total coincidence that this blog’s first post is as much about writing as design. I may not be ready to reveal my own hitotoki quite yet, but working on the site with these guys has clearly awoken something.