I found some unused/underused logos I designed for Tokyo hiphop duo Hifana lurking in the crates yesterday – here, a decorative, imperial take on Henk Krijger’s Raffia.

A Thai ornament-inflected logo using a Charles Burns shading treatment.

An unused logo variation for Hifana’s “Connect” LP – the best of the bunch.

You can see our recent work in the latest issue of Frame Magazine.

I wrote this brief essay for an impromptu exhibition I had at VCFA of assorted posters I’ve made over the past few years in 2012.

Life is not tidy. Every individual is constrained by the expected hours of their day that comprise their life. If you are interested in writing, you must make the time to write. If you seek to do engaging design projects outside of commercial or cultural practice, you must make the time to cultivate that practice.

Since 2009, I have made it a point to create one poster every 90 days, print 1000 copies to 5000 copies, and distribute them freely throughout Tokyo. These posters, constrained to A3 – an industrial format comparable to 11″ X 17″ in the United States (an odd and idiosyncratic format that does not fit with the International Standards Organization’s proscribed international paper size formats) – have been created outside of the boundaries of typical practice.

They are design without clients. A URL and series number are included for cataloging purposes, not for promotion. The series has included a widespread attempt at sampling the  vernacular of Japanese commercial art, ranging from outright theft and re-assemblage of imagery to mimicry of indigenous forms of Japanese modern design to cultural critiques, herein represented in the narrow range of spiritual beliefs of cult-like belief systems that have been widespread throughout Japan.

This is a very limited sampling of what has been created over the past five years. They are here for you to take freely and use as you will.

Graphic Design has experienced an insurgence of the popularization of dated reprographic technology, notably the Risograph, a relatively small-scale printing system that utilizes stencil-based printing in lieu of more common photocopier technology.

The Risograph is a Japanese product manufactured by the Riso Kagaku Corporation, yet whose aesthetic has been co-opted and popularized within Graphic Design culture by establishments in Great Britain and Germany but whose usage is most prevalent within community centers and senior citizens centers within Japan.

How we print has a history. It has a heritage. It is an unacknowledged heritage. It is an unexplored heritage. In essence, it is a colonial heritage in the post-colonial age – taking from other cultures and acknowledging little beyond a footnote or a colophon.

Aesthetics always have an origin.

A collaboration with Klein Dytham architecture. Ian Lynam Design created the interior graphic design scheme for Google’s new floor of offices in Roppongi.

Hundreds of meters of custom wallpapers with bespoke graphics were designed that crossed six complementary graphic themes:

• a stylized koi pond for the office entrance

• an abstracted, hyper-pop alternate Tokyo for meeting rooms

• garden brickwork with emphasized decorative elements revealing the hidden gardens of Tokyo for hallways and common areas

• sedate gardens for the relaxation and wellness area

• a modular Tokyo for the technical services area

• windows into the Tokyo of the future created in a psychedelic take on 60s and 70s science fiction book covers

We also designed a trilingual room signage system using an alternate, but complementary graphic language.

Thanks to everyone at KDa and Google for making it such a terrific finished project!

All photos © Koichi Torimura & Toshiki Senoue.

Read more about it in the new “Spaces + Places” section of our website, along with another recent project for Google.

Doodle 4 Google is a contest where Google invites students in Japan to use their artistic talents to think big and to redesign Google’s homepage logo for millions to see. We created the full experience for Google’s Doodle 4 Google event in Tokyo in 2012. The project included set design, stage design, animations, lighting design, print design and sound design.

We also designed the after-party, which included activities such as a suite of computers running Google Jam attached to tactile interfaces. We used the Makey Makey system to turn pieces of Play-Doh into a guitar, the floor into a piano and pencil drawings into a drum kit. Less high-tech activities, such as doodling on the windows to build “the Tokyo of the future”, cookie decorating and playing with multiple Google-themed yoga balls rounded out the event.

Signage for Portland design management group Upswell‘s new office.

Poster for Portland’s NW Film Center‘s Japanese Currents film program.

Fred Armisen and our logo for LePigeon in Episode 1 of Season 3 of the TV show Portlandia.

Chef/partner Gabe Rucker makes a brief appearance, as well!

I just received the catalog for the 2012 Asia Pacific Design Awards in the mail from Sandu Media in China. It’s a mammoth tome – over 500 pages, gilt-edged with blind debossed covers.

I would like to give a shout-out to all of the folks in Japan that I selected as a judge for the Asia Pacific Design Awards this year…

… but none more than Yuki Masuko, one of the hardest-working graphic designers out there and a fabulous, inspiring individual.

I wrote an essay for the book and am including it here. It expounds on certain themes from recent pieces I’ve written, as well as taking aim at certain trends within graphic design which I find problematic. You can read it in full here.

I wrote an essay for the book and am including it here. It expounds on certain themes from recent pieces I’ve written, as well as taking aim at certain trends within graphic design which I find problematic. The essay in entirety follows.

 

by Ian Lynam

The past year has been one of upheaval for the world, but exceptionally so for Asia. We have seen the growth of China’s economy, surpassing Japan’s to become the second largest in the world. Japan weathered a devastating tsunami, nuclear devastation in the Fukushima area, the resultant economic downturn and the resulting mass exodus of Japan-based foreign creative workers. This was countered with Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai and other Asian capitals experiencing an exponential immigration of designers and other creatives.

2011 and the first half of 2012 were times of tumult and immense change for Asia… yet, you wouldn’t really notice it if you looked at the bulk of graphic design that has come forth from Asia (and the world) over the past year. Globally, Graphic Design feels as if it has hit a visual slump. Truly original graphic design work is rare – nearly everything feels like an update of the work of Herb Lubalin and his associates, spins on the blocky display type of NonFormat and copious aping of Archis layouts. Originality in visual concepts and form-making is at a near-standstill — the output of our industry feels dominated by predetermined standards and aesthetics. North America is still in the throes of Zombie Modernism 2.0¹, a fascination with decorative design akin to transitional-era produce box lettering and design² and mid-century Modern design work³. Europe is in love with the stripped-down, sparse aesthetics of Karel Martens and his Werplaats Typographie and the low-fidelity look of the British small press mini-explosion of the 1960s and 1970s (with small deviations into Desktop Publishing aesthetic territory)⁴. Both are still infatuated with three-dimensional diorama work and modular playful typography, and will continue to do so for a few more years, at least.

Unsurprisingly, Western Europe and American graphic design institutions and tastemakers continue to ignore work from abroad. The recent U.S.-curated retrospective of the past decade of activity within Graphic Design as a sphere of cultural activity, Graphic Design: Now In Production, offers almost no work from Asia (and none whatsoever from Africa). Japanese design units such as W+K Tokyo Lab (formally rich, detail-oriented motion graphics), Dainippon Type Organization (operating at the intersection of concept and modular typography/lettering) and Yugo Nakamura’s THA (trailblazing web-based aesthetics and practices) go unmentioned. Korea’s Ahn Sang-Soo and his revisionist approach to the form of the Korean visual language is unjustifiably unnoted. Active leading designers in Taiwan such as Imin Pao, a forerunner in creating dynamic corporate design work while self-publishing typographical concerns, again, gets no mention. Chinese Graphic Design might as well not exist in the American version of graphic design history.

The sum of this is proof that a Western Europe/America-centric worldview is still the norm outside of Asia, and the only way to expand understanding of Asian graphic design is to innovate, not merely work within predetermined formal styles and to pursue client work alone. Now is the time of change — a time for Asian graphic designers to document and promote Asia as a vital geographic and cultural area of production. It might make the design press abroad stand up and take notice, but more importantly, now is the time to write our own histories and our own future histories. If there ever was a time for originality, formal expression outside of known boundaries and breaking new ground, it is the present. Graphic Design in Asia needs an internal boot-to-the-ass, not just in terms of visual style, but in the realms of history, criticism and exploration of theory.

One such project is the Korea-initiated Ondol⁵. Ondol is a student research project led by Kookmin University professor Chris Ro that explores little-noted Korean graphic design and typographic history in journal form. Despite having only two volumes published to date, Ondol has greatly added to the discourse and body of Korean Graphic Design literature, education and understanding. This type of publication, one that celebrates an indigenous history while promoting an exploration of the visual form of language from a specific nation and acknowledging influence from years of colonialism is an example of groundbreaking work. Ondol involves students in design education while also creating beautiful, form-immersive graphic design.

The past decade has seen Idea in Japan departing from a more internationalist approach to being one that is more Japan-centric and focused on promoting the wide range of engaging work being produced in Japan. This is primarily due to the efforts of Idea’s editor-in-chief Kiyonori Muroga, an individual with faith in the efforts of graphic designers in his country and a desire to promote Japanese Graphic Design as being something other than secondary to American/European Graphic Design work and culture. He has actively promoted Graphic Design work and writing that comes from a singularly Japanese perspective, and has steered the most influential graphic design publication in Japan toward building a catalogue of documentation of this indigenous, standalone sector. Simultaneously, he has directed issues documenting extensive coverage of Graphic Design projects from Korea and China, helping to expand international cultural understanding of Graphic Design activity in Asia.

Graphic Design is not merely cultural hairdressing. It is a vital, viable engagement with culture, history, theory, visual language, and form-making. It is a practice with its own goals, as well as a collective area of production with collaboration as its base. This is the era of documenting our own history. Graphic Design is no longer merely “advertising art” or “commercial art”. It is a high-profile area of critical cultural production that can serve to educate as well as entertain. Graphic Design is, as ever, what we make of it. It is up to each of us as graphic designers to help expand the boundaries of our chosen scope of activity and to uplift it in the eyes of greater culture, be it in our own countries or in the eyes of the world. Relying upon a Western definition of graphic design practice and acceptable activity is wholly unacceptable. We as practitioners define what Graphic Design is.

1 “Zombie Modernism”, Jeffery Keedy, Emigre #34, 1995

2 http://losttype.com/

3 http://grainedit.com/

4 http://www.manystuff.org/

5 http://betterdays.kr/