Howdy folks,As many of you may or may not know, I’ve been working on a book for the past couple of years―a pretty massive collection of essays about design and culture called Parting It Out. Well, I’m finally in the end zone, and I’m launching a Kickstarter project to help fund it.

You can see it here:
Parting It Out Kickstarter page

This book is probably the most important project I have done to date. As a project, it documents finding my voice as a writer, a design critic and a memoir writer (without the drama that usually involves). I think it’s a good balance of design theory and pop culture writing with just enough personality injected so that I can stake a claim to a very specific type of writing in the continuum of design literature. (And while I have done this via writing for magazines and blogs, said formats just don’t have a very long shelf life, whereas a book does.)

I am writing, of course, to ask you to potentially contribute to this project, but just as importantly, to ask you to help share of this project with your friends and communities, be that through social media, email, conversation, or what have you. The more people that learn about this project, the higher a chance of it of actually getting funded.

I try not to lean on my friends for favors too often, but this is what it is. I won’t be barraging you with newsletters or emails about this project, however I will be making the most of Twitter (@ilynam), Instagram (http://instagram.com/ianlynam) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ianlynam) to document the journey. After the Kickstarter campaign ends, you will be able to continue to see progress here (though it directs to the Kickstarter page presently):

http://part.ianlynam.com.

Thanks very much for taking the time to read this. If you have the time to check out the Kickstarter page, you’ll learn all about this book project in-depth. There’s a fun video there with an unreleased(!) soundtrack by Evan from Ratatat, links to content, and sample images from the book.

Your pal,
Ian

We designed the wayfinding systems for Google’s Tokyo offices. I documented the process in an essay called “Faith/Void Split” which was published in Slanted. In lieu of photographic documentation of the hundreds of signs I created, I have excerpted the essay here. :

It is a Monday in April, 2012. I am on the 50th floor of a giant office building in the middle of one of Tokyo’s largest financial centers, staring at the ceiling and trying to think of how the fuck I am going to come up with a wayfinding plan to make navigation of 600-plus offices, meeting rooms, and cafeterias spread out over three floors easier for the 1,000-plus people that work there. They’re already lost as hell in the two floors they currently occupy, and the addition of a whole new floor of offices has brought the mandate: get it to all make sense somehow. 

 The past few years have been a flurry of time lost to stopgap solutions with no apparent results. Every single one of my previous visits to the site has revealed employee-after-employee squinting, scrutinizing, craning necks sideways, and attempting to make some sort of sense of the never-ending parade of laminated floor plans set with 4-point type, as well as a lack of depicted physical orientation. The new signage system must be big, bold, and obvious. It must use numerous mnemonics including color, two languages, and some semblance of form-making. The site is gigantic, and for some reason, I have been chosen to make it happen. This in itself is a really cool thing: it’s one of those star projects that every designer dreams of—the budget is reasonable and it’s something so big that there’s a decent timeline. As long as I don’t fuck it up, it’s going to enhance the value of our rinky-dink little studio a thousand-fold. It’s going to be very interesting for these reasons, along with a variety of others, most notably in that I have no natural sense of direction. Perhaps this somehow makes me the most suitable candidate for the job—essentially, if I can figure it out, then so could anyone. 

Now, when I say I have no natural sense of direction, what I mean is that I constantly ride my bicycle around Tokyo blindly, unable to geolocate myself in any fashion, even with the help of Google Maps on my phone. I leave our home office an hour prior to meetings just to be safe if I have never been to a particular meeting place. I have lived in Tokyo for the past seven years, and this does not bode well. 

 I have always been like this—perhaps it’s the result of my country bumpkin childhood or my copious drug intake in my teens and twenties, though I doubt it. I have no idea. My mom grew up in the same small town I did and she gets around fine. She can drive from her new home in Prescott, Arizona to Los Angeles without a map, whereas I got insanely lost last time I was there just trying to get to the liquor store. I wish there was some Roland Barthes-ian post-Structural/poetic aspect to all of this, but there just isn’t. I have lived the past 39 years hopelessly lost and there is little doubt that this will continue until the time I’m interred.

This project was the result of going to a site and looking at how the humans who inhabit a site were interacting with their environment. One day, I had a meeting at Google and after haplessly attempting to decipher their wayfinding system, ambled upon the appropriate meeting area and waited outside.

While waiting, I watched diferent Googlers try to find where they were going and I started timing them—the average time they tried to decipher the old wayfinding came to an average of 30 seconds per person. For a company that prides itself on its engineering as much as their design, this seemed off…

I proposed a wayfinding system based on the greater scheme of the giant round building that the Tokyo division inhabits—round paths with bilingual stops akin to a nature trail.

Now, Googlers find their way quickly and immediately through their Tokyo offices via a quick visual scan. I tested the times last time I was there—people barely looked at the signs, and if they did, the maximum time was for 5 seconds.

I have some typefaces in the 2015 Typodarium type design calendar.

It’s obviously a little late for this.

Oh well.

Tee shirt design in for CalArts’ Graphic Design Department’s 2015 T-Shirt Show.

We just re-launched a responsive redesign of Klein Dytham architecture’s website.

New responsive website for Tokyo-based architecture and interior design practice Klein Dytham architects.

We just released Raker, a new 40-member family of typefaces.

Raker was born out of a love for retro science fiction aesthetics as evidenced in films like The Clone Returns Home, Moon,and Alien, while simultaneously being a text typeface with a humanist influence and solid spacing.

The family includes 4 cuts: Raker, Raker Display, Raker Stencil, and Raker Display Stencil. Each cut includes 5 weights of Roman and italic characters—Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, and Heavy.

Each weight of each cut has been lovingly spaced and kerned, and all weights support Western, Eastern and Central European languages. Hidden pattern glyphs are included, as are standard ligatures.

All italics are true italics and extensive currency support is included. All weights of all cuts have been extensively hinted for the best performance on-screen.

Raker was designed to function as a fun, futuristic family of typefaces that will suit a wide variety of applications. And even better, it’s on sale at Wordshape until March 1st for $49 for all 40 weights!

We just hit the button on a responsive website redesign for John Mullin, professional photographer and art educator. We’ve worked with John for years and were excited to relaunch his site with webfonts, some snazzy javascript, and a few CSS tricks. John is one of the United States’ great contemporary photographers, as well as the protegé and former assistant of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

We also just launched a responsive website design for Kozue, a new luxury building project in Niseko, Hokkaido being managed by Nisade. The Kozue website features webfont implementation, some fancy javascript, adaptive CSS, and solid, sedate design. You can check it out here.

We also just published our annual round-up of what’s been happening in Japanese popular culture over at Néojaponisme. 2014, we hardly knew ye!

Responsive website design and development for Kozue, a new luxury condominium project in Niseko, Hokkaido being managed by Nisade. The Kozue website features webfont implementation, some fancy javascript, adaptive CSS, and solid, sedate design. View the website here.

Responsive website redesign for John Mullin, professional photographer and art educator. We’ve worked with John for years and were excited to relaunch his site with webfonts, some snazzy javascript, and a few CSS tricks. John is one of the United States’ great contemporary photographers, as well as the protegé and former assistant of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

When Whole Foods needed to brand their 2014 holiday “Values Matter” ad campaign with a personality-rich, hand drawn font, they chose the often-imitated-but-never-duplicated YWFT Hannah, YouWorkForThem’s own in-house champ.

In this case, their choice was specific to YWFT Hannah Narrow, which begged their question: could we design two additional weights for this individual font, which existed only in a regular weight? Their answer was “yes”.

Then, YWFT called us. We’ve had an amazing working relationship with YWFT for the past chunk of years—we speak the same languages: OpenType, Python, CSS, and just being stoked on type.

Working closely with the team at their advertising agency Partners & Spade, we designed and refined Semi-Bold and Bold weights of YWFT Hannah Narrow, and offered specialized technical support to the Whole Foods art and marketing departments at their request.

Plus, we added alternate characters galore and iterated the new Whole Foods typeface family into the ground.

It felt good. Really, really good.

Whole Foods Values Matter TV Commercial: Produce
Learn More – http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/valuesmatter

Whole Foods Values Matter TV Commercial: Beef
Learn More – http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/valuesmatter