I will be giving this lecture in Tokyo in March.

The Tokyo Olympics’ Visual Identity & Japanese Graphic Design

Date: Wednesday, March 23, 2016
Time: 7:30 p.m.- 9:00 p.m. (doors open at 7:00 p.m.)
Venue: Temple University Japan Campus, Mita Hall 5F
(access: http://www.tuj.ac.jp/maps/tokyo.html)
Speaker:
Ian Lynam, Chair and faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts in the MFA Graphic Design program and adjunct faculty at Temple University Japan Campus
Moderator:
Kyle Cleveland, Associate Director of ICAS
Admission: Free. Open to public
Language: English
RSVP:  icas@tuj.temple.edu
* If you RSVP you are automatically registered. If possible, we ask you to RSVP but we always welcome participants even you do not RSVP.
* RSVPなしでも参加できますので、直接会場へお越しください。
Overview

There has been an international uproar over the public Tokyo Olympic logo competition. Many professional designers hate it because it devalues their labor. The public loves it because it democratizes design. Expanding on his visual essay “Why We Should Really Be Concerned About the Visual Identity for the Tokyo Olympics”, (https://medium.com/@ianlynam/why-we-should-really-be-concerned-about-the-visual-identity-for-the-tokyo-olympics-969830d0e819#.h3ojbgtfo) Ian Lynam looks to design history and cultural narrative to help explain a history of design and the Olympics in Japan.

I was just featured on Lifehacker Japan in a post about the Now Japan conference that I spoke at in Lithuania last year. Thanks, Rie!

I just returned home after my lecture tour of the U.S. East Coast. The turnouts at VCFA, University of Hartford, Rutgers, Temple, and York College were great. Many thanks to the Dont Rhine, Luis Jacob, the VCFA Visual Art program, Matthew Monk, Jenn Renko, Jason Cheshire, Deb Kline, the Connecticut Art Directors Club, Jason Alejandro, Dermot McCormack, Troy Patterson and Mel Rodgers. What a swell bunch of folks for setting this all up! (Giant thanks to Evan Mast for letting me stink up his couch in NYC, as well.)

My exhibition “That’s Entertainment!” had a great response in York, Pennsylvania at Marketview Arts. All exhibition photography by Troy Patterson.

We recently finished up designing the visual identity for Matt Treyvaud, our compatriot over at Néojaponisme and one of the best writers and translators out there!

I will be giving a five-date lecture tour of the Northeast U.S. in two weeks, as well as debuting a new exhibition at York College of Pennsylvania called “That’s Entertainment.” that is a synthesis of my work as a designer and design critic. I wrote a new essay-as-website which forms the backbone of the exhibition. You can read it here, as well as download PDF versions of the posters that comprise the exhibition.

At the exhibition itself, an unnumbered edition of 100 of the posters in the exhibition will be given away for free. There are 32 posters, so that means that 3,200 posters will be given away.

Montpelier, VT:
Lecture: “There’s Chocolate in my Peanut Butter.”
January 27, 10AM
VCFA Noble Hall
36 College St.
Montpelier, VT 05602
http://vcfa.edu

Hartford, CT:
Lecture: “Tokyo, we have a problem.”
presented by the Connecticut Art Directors Club
Friday, January 29th, 7PM
University of Hartford
Koopman Commons in the Renée Samuels Center
http://www.cadc.org/

Rutgers, NJ:
The Winners & Losers of History – The Emergence of Japanese Graphic Design
February 1st, 6pm-8pm
Rutgers University
Mason Gross School of the Arts
Civic Square Building, Room 218C
33 Livingston Avenue
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
http://www.masongross.rutgers.edu/performing-arts-center/galleries/directions

Philadelphia, PA:
Lecture: “There’s Chocolate in my Peanut Butter.”
February 3, 2016. Time TBA.
Tyler School of Art, Temple University
https://www.temple.edu/

York, PA:
Lecture: “There’s Chocolate in my Peanut Butter.”
February 4, 2016 at 7:00pm
DeMeester Recital Hall in Wolf Hall
York College of Pennsylvania

That’s Entertainment!: An Exhibition
February 5 – March 19, 2016
Opening: February 5, 2016 at 5:00pm
Coni Wolf Gallery at Marketview Arts
37 W Philadelphia St.
York, Pennsylvania 17401
http://entertain.ianlynam.com/

All of the lectures are open to the public.

I just published a Japanese version of my essay on the Olympics logo design competition. You can read it here.

We’ve been working with Ivan Vartanian and the team at Goliga over the past year on the website for the traveling exhibition “Cities” by Sohei Nishino. Having taken place in Amsterdam, London, Paris, and now Tokyo, the exhibition features giant collaged photographic works by Mr. Nishino which represent weeks of photographing each city, then collaging individual photos into one giant work.

We created an integrated panel viewer system and Stripe-based e-commerce checkout system so that website users can select ten separate panels from the exhibition and purchase them online.

I just wrote a pretty scathing critique of the 2020 Olympic logo competition. You can read it here.

Dave Peacock and I made this series of six 2-color Risograph posters for the recent AIGA National Conference.

I have an essay in Slanted #28, which just came out. The theme for this issue is New York.

The cover is very shiny.

The table of contents.

My essay, titled “Escape from New York”.

And the end of my essay, still titled “Escape From New York”.