Announcement card for the Meeting Modernity exhibition in Portland, Oregon at Reading Frenzy Meeting Modernity is a traveling exhibition of found photography documenting Japan as it engaged with modernization and commercial photography in the Meiji and Taisho Periods of history. The Meeting Modernity series is comprised of portrait photography in particular. Meeting Modernity is the focus of my online cultural journal Néojaponisme’s first traveling exhibition.

Website for Nagoya electronic musicians and sound design studio Lullatone. See the website here.

Art direction, design, and illustration for Lesque Skateboards’ Winter 2008 line of skateboards. Lesque is an independent skateboard company based in Tokyo. One design features the work of illustrator Toshiko Kimura.

 
Essay about the state of logo design in the contemporary graphic design field for Idea Magazine. I lucked out and got to design this section of the issue, as well.

Identity refresh for Hermitage, a wallpaper and home design shop in Portland, Oregon.

CMS-controlled website for Five by Fifty, Asia’s fastest growing trend analysis and market research agency focused on Asian Consumer Intelligence. This WordPress-based CSS-driven website is fully updatable by the client and includes a custom PHP mailer along with copious client intranets used to deliver regular reports on what is happening in Asia, trend-wise. The updated site features LinkedIn feeds, Twitter feeds, and an updated appearance with large graphics.

Logo, English naming conventions, key art, and print campaign for the feature film The Clone Returns Home, directed by Kanji Nakajima and executive produced by Wim Wenders. Producer Hikari Ohta and I collaborated to bring the film an updated name and identity informed by JAXA’s early identity explorations as much as Dutch Modernism.

Typeface and lettering design reproduced in the catalog for Alphabet. Official press release:

Focusing on an ordinary subject that we see each day, often by the hundreds of thousands, Alphabet presents 26 letters as more than just shapes for conveying information. The 51 artists and designers in this show conceive and interpret the alphabet in surprising and inventive ways, ranging from graceful and polished to witty and unconventional. The 63 alphabets featured in Alphabet were created by artists in North America, Europe, and Asia, and represent work from well-known typographers and designers as well as rising artists and design students.

The alphabets in the exhibition reflect a range of thinking about letters that encompasses the conceptual, illustrative, typographic, and beyond. Some of the artists have created their alphabets from a variety of non-traditional media or found objects, while others render their forms with pen and ink in obsessive detail. By presenting each alphabet removed from the context of words and typography, we focus on these 26 shapes as forms unto themselves rather than just the building blocks of words. The alphabets in the exhibition (all received through an open call) are shown dissected into their base elements–A through Z–freeing the artists and designers from the confines of legibility. At the same time, they are challenged to expand the experiment (usually created only to form a single word or image) into a complete system that goes beyond a short headline, the realm to which such experimentation is usually relegated.

Alphabet opened in Baltimore in conjunction with the city’s 2005 Artscape festival, and is traveling nationally through 2009. Alphabet was curated by Post Typography and organized by Artscape.

After traveling around the United States for the past three and a half years, the Post Typography-curated, Artscape organized show, Alphabet: An Exhibition of Hand-Drawn Lettering & Experimental Typography is returning to Baltimore in April.

Alphabet will be on display at Baltimore’s Current Gallery from April 3 – 26 with a reception the evening of April 10. The exhibition presents alphabets created by 51 international artists and designers, from well-known typographers to rising artists and design students. Alphabet opened in Baltimore in conjunction with the city’s 2005 Artscape festival, and is traveling nationally through 2009.

Current Gallery
30 South Calvert Street
Baltimore Md 21202

An interview with Portland, Oregon-based printers and publishers Pinball Publishing for Néojaponisme and Viewers Like U.