My essay “With A Spatula in Her Hand” was just published on the website for Modes of Criticism, a new design criticism magazine. I will have another essay in the inaugural print issue, out soon.

PechaKucha Night Tokyo X Tokyo Design Week just finished up a few days ago – one of the biggest PechaKucha events ever! 1,000 folks hanging out and listening to presentations by designers from all over the world.

For us, one of the most exciting things was seeing our logo design for PechaKucha Night projected h-u-u-u-u-ge across the interior of a geodesic dome.

R. Buckminster Fuller is one of our heroes and the geodesic dome one of the most appealing structures in architecture, so to have our design applied to one, even a temporary one, was fantasic.

Photos by the amazing Michael Holmes Photo.

I designed a new “wire” variant on the YACHT logo for Jona and Claire today for the band’s tenth anniversary, oddly enough occuring on my 40th birthday. Flyer below not by me.

Our new ad campaign for NASA and The Washington County Museum launched this month. Hubble Space Telescope: New Views of the Universe opens on November 17.

We’ve been knee deep in a fair amount of identity work lately, as well. We crafted up a logo and identity system for Michael Holmes Photo of Tokyo.

Just finished, as well, is the identity and environmental design for Le Comptoir Occitan, a new Basque restaurant in Daikanyama within Hillside Terrace. More photos coming soon.

I won an Asia Pacific Design Award again. Whoo! And I didn’t even pick myself!

Some exciting news: I am joining the faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts, teaching in their MFA graphic design program as of October. The university is a low-residency program and I’ll be teaching both in Vermont and from home base in Tokyo.

Japanese Graphic Design: Not in Production, a new piece of design criticism I wrote has been posted at Néojaponisme. It will be followed by six supplementary posts showing the best that Japanese contemporary graphic design has to offer.

One small, subtle design change has been added to our website, but one that is huge and took a whole lot of work: ianlynam.com is now bilingual in English and Japanese.

Giant thanks to Yamane-san for plowing through miles of project translations, consulting with us on arcane typographic terms and just generally being amazing. Equally gigantic thanks to Yuki for collecting project text, editing through the sweaty summer, coordinating the whole project and making it all go smoothly. Go team!!!

宜しく!

One of the most exciting projects we’ve been working on as of late is developing the identity and user interface/user experience for Videogram, a brand spanking new integrated iOS app and web app created by the amazing team at Cinemacraft.

Videogram allows you to convert your personal iOS video, YouTube and Vimeo videos to interactive sequential art (comics!). Videos become sequences of still which you can click through to view video.

Revolutionary stuff, debuting this weekend at TechCrunch in San Francisco!

Working on Videogram has been an amazing iterative process – nothing is written in stone and everything is up for grabs!

I will be lecturing on October 17 and doing a workshop on October 19 at the Vermont College of Fine Art for their MFA program in Graphic Design.

I have a new essay up on Néojaponisme called “Candid Thoughts on the 2020 Olympic Logo”.

Korea! I’m going to be lecturing on September 25 at Hongik University and on September 26 at Kookmin University, both in Seoul. More info soon!

I contributed a 14-page standalone section to the latest issue of Germany’s Slanted  magazine called Japanese Graphic Design: Not In Production. This feature stands as a critical response the current graphic design retrospective of the past ten years Graphic Design: Now In Production, Zombie Modernism 2.0 and my desire for ambiguity and contradiction in graphic design, not simplistic formula-based design.

We have a couple of awesome new clients – notably the Washington County Museum…

and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)!

Our fonts are now being distributed by the UK’s Hype For Type.

I pitched in on the writing and editing of the definitive monograph of Japanese photographer Masayoshi Sukita, along with Kiyonori Muroga of Idea. Sukita’s work chronicles much of rock and roll history from the late 1960s through today, with a heavy focus on the work of David Bowie, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Joe Strummer and the circle of friends surrounding Jim Jarmusch.

Lovingly designed by HeQuiti Harata, it’s a must-get.

I would like to extend a giant round of thanks to all of the attendees of our lecture on the work of Oswald Bruce “Oz” Cooper at TypeCon in Milwaukee. It was such a tremendous response and so appreciated.

If you’d like a copy of the text that the lecture was based on, you can order a copy of Idea #339 here from Wordshape.

Our studio has created revivals of many of the typefaces covered in the lecture. You can check them out here from Wordshape, here from MyFonts and here from YouWorkFromThem.

Thanks to the Society of Typographic Aficionados and the TypeCon board for having us come present. TypeCon2012 was amazing!

I have a ton of work in the new book Logolicious from HarperCollins.

My recent poster series with Chad Rea for Electricity Showroom is now available via Ecopop.

Got a nice little shoutout in Eye Magazine’s blog today. Whoot!

I’ll be doing a piped-in lecture at Otis College of Design on Wednesday at 3pm PST. (Bum rush the show!)

While watching Season Three of Futurama, we discovered that the folks who made the show used a handful of Wordshape fonts, most noticeably Cooper Black Swash Italic here and there throughout. Exciting to find your work out in the televised world!

I have a new feature in the latest issue of Slanted Magazine– an essay about wayfinding and mortality.

I also edited Toshiaki Koga’s new feature about the work of Zak Kyes in the latest issue of Idea.

Our fonts are featured over at WebInk this month.

Our Wordshape fonts are now being distributed by YouWorkForThem- the first typeface offerings are available here.

We’d like to extend a giant round of thanks to all of the individuals we have had the opportunity to work with throughout 2012 so far. It’s been a really, really exciting first two quarters and we’re working on some of the most engaging projects of our careers, both large and small. Thanks, one and all!

We just created a new website and identity for BeBespoke, a new experience atelier business in Tokyo.

I’m currently working on a collaborative poster series with master of disaster Ed Fella in which we make visual form go head-to-head. Exciting times!

Bang your head! Some of Wordshape’s most popular fonts are available at a 50% discount this month from MyFonts! Perfect for music packaging, identity work and movie packaging/titling, the “Metal Militia” packs the visual equivalent of a Marshall stack! Check out the sale here!

We’ve undertaken an exciting new project with our pal Jared Braiterman PhD of Tokyo Green Space that catalogs over 500 Japanese gardens outside of Japan for Nodai, the Tokyo University of Agriculture.

We’re really excited to be working with Jared. He is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Tokyo University. Jared is a Harvard and Stanford trained design anthropologist who has worked in university education, start-up consulting, social media, and urban planning in Japan, the Americas, and Europe.

Open Skateboards has a few team decks out now on sale.

I’ll be presenting tonight at the Magazine Library special edition of PechaKucha Night in Daikanyama. The topic: A Dozen Publications That Changed My Life.

We’ve relaunched our web journal Néojaponisme with @font-face integration, a bespoke mobile theme and enhanced readability.

Cameron McKean and I did a lengthy cross interview for the latest issue of 360 magazine from China- out soon.

We put up a small mobile-friendly site redesign for our pals Upswell in Portland recently.

We just finished up an identity for the P.INC Patio, a new summer restaurant in Penticton, British Columbia in Canada that will open in a few scant months…

Smythe Sans and a whole bunch of other new Wordshape fonts are now available via Fontspring, the indie webfont provider alternative.

Last year we released the font Kirimomi Swash Italic, which was a runaway smash hit- it’s a free font whose creation was sponsored by Onitsuka Tiger. We just reached 35,000 downloads from our assorted distributors, which, in my book, is total brutality. So, to celebrate, I put together an accompanying Jannon-inspired Roman serif that is available now from MyFonts.com.

More here!

I’ll be giving a presentation on the secret life of American type designer Oswald Bruce Cooper at TypeCon 2012 in Milwaukee this year. The conference is from July 31st through August 5th. Yuki and I will both be in attendance. Come hang out with us!
More at the Typecon website.

We recently designed new business cards for the three of us, and were paid the ultimate print design compliment in return- our business cards are some of the featured items over at FPO this week. Huzzah!

We got a great huge package of zines in the mail from the intrepid Elly Blue of Taking The Lane zine fame this week. It’s so great to see our fonts put to such great use!

New poster design for my band Redskins.

Also, I was recently interviewed by the nice folks over at ID Institute in Germany. Read it here.

I co-edited and contributed a few essays to Idea Magazine‘s new feature about New Wave/PostPunk independent publications, on newsstands any day now…

One is called “Dot Gain” and is an introduction to independent publications in the late 70s and the early 80s.

The second is a hybrid essay/interview with WET magazine founder Leonard Koren about WET and his life and times.

Special thanks to Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein for their assistance in researching the essay!

Just did a quickie project for the notorious Tokyo Art Beat: some quick OpenType scripting to swap out lining numerals for non-lining numerals in their house font.

An oldie but a goodie: my typeface Rubber Vloeren in use in a commercial by Brand New School for the American National Pork Board circa years ago. See it here.

I have a whole heap of writing in the new issue of Slanted Magazine. My dear friend and roomie Patrick Tsai is featured, as well.

My latest deck graphic for Lesque just came out- it’s Junichi Arahata’s latest pro model. In use: my font Pompeian Cursive.

I received a few samples of recent projects done by Bruce Brand of the fabulous Arthole in the mail- excellent examples of my Wordshape fonts in use! Bruce has done tons of great design work for folks like Wreckless Eric, The Whites Stripes, Thee Headcoats, The Darkness and others.

Fancy new signage by Joshu+Vela.

Ages ago I designed a tee shirt for the British clothing startup Yutaka Tajima and it just saw the light of day here.

Thanks to Bob and the team for making it happen.

Also, we recently designed, animated and produced a small promotional screencast-based video for myGengo, an exciting Tokyo-based startup which has an exciting track record of providing really amazing human-based translation services. You can see the animation here.

Big thanks to Hiroto, Lisa, Matt and the myGengo team!

(And seriously, use them for translation.)

You can see a recent PechaKucha Night lecture I did about Cuban lettering here.

For the month of March, my new typeface family SmytheSans is on sale over at MyFonts- get the entire family for only $120 instead of the usual $300.

I have some work in the new book chronicling the shifting identity of Yutaka Tajima, a small British apparel concern run by Sanderson Bob (ex-The Designers Republic) and friends.

Do you enjoy reading about graphic design? Then, boy, do I have a treat for you!

Until they’re gone, essentially, I’ll send you a copy of The Space Is The Place Supplement – my 52-page booklet of writing about design, aesthetics and architecture for free- you just have to pony up the cost of postage (¥200 in Japan, $3.00 internationally via Paypal to ian@ianlynam.com).

The booklet was printed in an edition of 1,000 using a gradated split-fountain technique, creating gradated printing throughout. 500 were printed with fluorescent green cover stock and 500 with fluorescent yellow cover stock.

Within, you’ll find writing on the work of designer Kiyoshi Awazu, Japanese Modernism, Arcosanti and a fair amount of other concerns.

My new font Kommisar is on sale for the next month over at MyFonts! $16.25 only for March!

I wrote the preface for the latest book of collected graphic design from Sandu Media/Gingko Press- it’s called Mini Graphics II and will be available from finer booksellers everywhere in a moment!

The latest video I directed for Onitsuka Tiger, “Genten Episode 2: Milestones / 軌跡” is out now. The Japanese version is here.

The SmytheSans font family is now available via MyFonts!

My font Devil’s Advocate in use in the new CalArts newspaper, the CalArts Eye.

I was recently interviewed at ID-Institute. Read it here.

Just released: my new typeface family SmytheSans.

SmytheSans is the result of a year-long inquiry into exploring a contemporary sans serif that is eminently readable on-screen and in print. It features a large x-height, ample yet economic spacing for capitals, small caps, a Central and Eastern European character set and is offered in five weights: thin, ultra light, light, regular and bold.

These are offset by matching italic and oblique cuts of each weight to give designers more variation- the italic has flared, calligraphically-inspired terminals and is a true italic, while the oblique is more mechanical in appearance. (In reality, the “oblique” is actually an italic as well due to the single-storied nature of the the “a” of the typeface, though it’s just easier to call it an “oblique” rather than “italic 2”.)

The typeface also includes five weights of a retro-futuristic display face called SmytheSans Display that bring in more idiosyncratic characters for display setting- a NASA-inspired space age “A”, a decorative “double-V” treatment for the “W”, and a whole lot more.

The lighter weights are slightly slimmer than the regular and bold weights to give the typeface more of a vertical feel, inviting readers’ to rapidly read typeset text with a maximum of contrast and a minimum of optical dazzle. The entire family was given rigorous testing using Craig Mod’s Bibliotype html-based book layout system for on-screen rendering checks and innumerable print proofs using actual text (not Greek) in InDesign.

For a very limited time, Wordshape alone is offering SmytheSans as an entire family in OpenType format for half-price: 20 fonts for only $200. Each weight of SmytheSans is offered at $20 per through other distributors, so licensing through Wordshape is the most affordable option out there! Go get ’em!

My font Clobber Grotesk in use for the upcoming Amersand Web Typography conference in the UK. (Scroll to the bottom and choose “Swiss” as your language).

Great new YACHT video!

One of my absolute favorite clients is the bag- and accessory-maker Joshu + Vela, a small shop based in San Francisco. Noah Guy, the man behind the magic, and his group of cohorts make amazing crafted leather goods by hand in their San Francisco workshop.

They’ve been having a fair amount of success as of late, their wares having been picked up by the Banana Republic for distribution, as well as having won over a number of new stockists. It’s all the well-earned result of years of hard labor, day jobs and having friends pitch in. It’s a hard-won success, but one that I am proud to have been a part of.

Joshu+Vela’s products are things that I not only “believe in” (“believe in” is the term trotted out by marketing types at the drop of a hat), but use every single damn day. One of their belts holds my pants up day-in and day-out and one of their wallets houses my cash.

The point? Rad stuff. Go check out their new collection.

New poster for PechaKucha Night Tokyo‘s upcoming event.

I edited the interview and massive retrospective of the work of legendary Swiss graphic designer Bruno Monguzzi for the latest issue of Idea Magazine #351.

Available internationally from Wordshape.

Better late than never, I just gave Viewers Like You a little graphic facelift. Max Erdenberger and I started VLU in 2006. 50,000 viewers strong…

As mentioned recently, I served as a judge and on the editorial committee for this year’s Asia Pacific Design Awards. The books that serve as the repository of all of the winning work came in the other day and are currently being distributed to the prospective winners.

These books are massively heavy- if dropped from shoulder height, you could very easily crush a small mammal. If you were to do this, however, you’d stain the beautiful embossed fabric-bound hardcover binding and potentially mar the gleaming gold-leafed docked edges of the pages. This is decidedly not a modest book – it is a celebration of the best that Asian graphic design has to offer at present, and via page count, bespoke material choices and the sheer quality of work within, celebrates it in style.

The official blurb about the Awards:

As a top representative of graphic design in Asia-Pacific region, APD collects excellent graphic designs from Asian countries or regions and those along Pacific Ocean. APD aims at promoting design in Asia-Pacific Region and providing good opportunities for excellent designers to stand out. It is the seventh volume this year in 2011. APD No. 7 continuously follows the publishing concept of original design and collects more excellent graphic designs. Putting outstanding designs on display, APD forges an interactive platform for exchanges and communication within the circles. It covers seven categories, respectively, visual identity, orientation system, type, poster, packaging, print, logo and graphics & extended product.

My choices for some of the top Japanese graphic design projects of the year included work by:

AQ
Benjamin Thomas / Bentographics
HeiQuiti Harata
Yoshihisa Shirai

Congratulations to the Award winners this year. You all do such beautiful, thoughtful work.

You can read more about the awards and order the book here.

The new logo and identity for PechaKucha‘s Global Cities Week launched yesterday. It’s a week-long celebration of the cities that host PechaKucha Night events all over the world.

I’ll be doing a casual presentation on lettering that I spotted around Cuba during my recent trip to the place where Americans aren’t supposed to go this Wednesday at PechaKucha Night Tokyo.

Last year I collaborated with Dwayne Dixon on creating a video framework to be used for Duke University’s video modules for training students in ethnographic fieldwork. Dwayne has gone through and filled out all of the modules into a comprehensive series of training videos to help students understand the ethical conduct of research with human subjects. Giant thanks to Dwayne, Lorna and the rest of the Duke team!

Client Little Bird, a bistro in Portland, Oregon, just got a swell writeup in the New York Times. See it here.

Tokyo Fashion Week branding now out in the world!

Just finished a slew of new book cover designs for Microcosm- first, the cover for Joe Biel’s new book of interviews Beyond The Music.

Next is a redesign of the cover for Stephen Duncombe’s seminal Notes from Underground.

Final is Joey Torrey’s Bamboozled.

New: Collaborative redesign of Tokyo club SuperDeluxe’s website with CPOS, running on their bespoke CMS.

I recently finished up the identity design for Tokyo Fashion Week 2013, alongside global initiatives like Tokyo Fashion Week in Italy and Tokyo Fashion Week in India. The logo is comprised of letterforms from a custom typeface that combines the geometric rationality of Futura with a more humanist sensibility.

Danish professor Thomas Mejer Hansen used one of my patterns for Néojaponsime for his recent paper “Inverse problems with non-trivial priors: Efficient solution through Sequential Gibbs Sampling”, co-authored with Knud Skou Cordua and Klaus Mosegaard. This essay examines how an analysis of pattern can allow incorporation of prior information of arbitrary complexity, or how to analyze patterns using proposed algorithms.

I wrote the introduction essay “Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down” for the new book Big Brand Theory, published by Sandu Media and Gingko Press. Check it out here and here.

I also recently judged the Asia Pacific Design Awards for the second time. More on that shortly…

… and my film “E-Waste” will be featured in the upcoming Sustainable Living Film Festival in Istanbul.

Client Don Blanquito, finds himself the subject of a New York Times feature and mini-doc. Congrats, Alex!

My work for Too Much Magazine is on display in London currently for the much-lauded Archizines exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

I have two new essays in Slanted Magazine #16, the latest issue of the German typography magazine.

One, “Hoofin’ It”, is about shoes, style, authenticity and the age of look and feel.

The other is called “Top Down” and is a look at urbanism, population density and Japanese typography.

In the summer of 2011, I headed to Kobe with Toshiki Senoue and Ippu Sansan to shoot a trio of videos documenting ASICS employee and blogger Mutaurwa Mapondera as he visited the birthplace of Onitsuka Tiger for the first time. The first episode is up now– one of the final brand stories for Onitsuka Tiger crafted with AQ for the year.

For all of November and December, all Wordshape orders of physical goods (Idea Magazine, books and posters) will receive a free copy of The Space Is The Place Supplement.

The latest font release from Wordshape, sponsored by Onitsuka Tiger is out now.

Read all about it, then download it at Néojaponisme.

Onick is the latest typeface resulting from a collaboration with Onitsuka Tiger and Néojaponisme, released by my type foundry Wordshape.

A handful of new projects have been added to the site, notably a new website for Tokyo architecture firm Klein Dytham architecture. The website comes as an accompaniment to KDa’s new projects designing a suite of Sony stores, Google’s Japan HQ and an array of new projects.

Also updated: the Space Is The Place button set, a CD design for Tokyo/Toronto band The Universal Moment, an editorial illustration for Plam Magazine and book design for Walls of Pride, about African American public art in Portland.

We just finished up another big project for Google- something that has consumed a few months worth of time and which we are proud of, but alas, can’t talk about other than saying “We work with Google”, which in itself is pretty great.

I’ll be presenting at PechaKucha Night in Tokyo next week, in association with Tokyo Design Week and DesignTide. The usual gag of giving away a ton of free stuff to the audience will be recurring.

I have work in a mini-exhibition devoted to Arcosanti at Vacant in Harajuku presently, courtesy of Too Much Magazine.

The exhibition is centered around my feature article about Arcosanti and contains photos and images by myself and my father, Bill Lynam, as well as sculpture and additional elements by others.

I just returned to Tokyo from a really great whirlwind lecture tour accompanying my exhibition in Portland, Oregon.

Giant thanks to Jon Sueda and Megan Lynch and all the kind folks at CCA, Yasmin Gibson, Kali Nikitas, Davey Whitcraft, Lauren Mackler and Kate Findley, as well as their fine students at Otis, Michael Worthington, Jeff Keedy, Ed Fella, Thea Lorentzen Hack, Ben Woodlock and all of the amazing people at CalArts, Kate Bingaman-Burt, Corbin LaMont and Jason Sturgill and all of the rocking students at PSU. Whew- long list, but I’m indebted to all of these folks for bringing me over to the States and listening intently as I spoke.

Giant thanks to everyone who attended the opening of Space Is The Place in Portland, as well!

I have a new essay on the work of Japanese editorial designer Yukimasa Matsuda in the new issue of Idea- #349.

Matsuda is one of my absolute favorite writers and designers and I’m really excited to have been able to contribute writing about his canon of work to the greater corpus of design writing.

I also edited essays about Shoji Ohtomo, Masaru Uchida and Joost Grootens for the new issue.

Leaving in a few hours for the U.S. for an exhibition in Portland and lectures in Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Updated lectures dates, times and locations follow!

“Space Is The Place”
Graphic Design by Ian Lynam
Land Gallery, Portland, Oregon

Opens Friday, October 7, 2011 at 5pm

Runs through October 30, 2011

The show’s a selection of work from the past 12 years of graphic design, featuring a bevy of poster designs, music packaging, book design, broadcast design and animation and tons of odds and ends. 1,000 zine-style catalogs will be given away at the exhibition that features recent writing and some more fun/experimental assignments from the design classes I teach to balance out the design work.

Land Gallery, located in the historic Mississippi Neighborhood of Portland, Oregon, features new, original work from a fantastic stable of upcoming and established independent artists.

For any more information on Land or for preview images for this show, please contact: Pat Castaldo @ 503-477-5704 or gallery@landpdx.com

Land

3925 N Mississippi Ave

Portland, OR 97227 USA
Landpdx.com

LECTURES

A mini-barrage of lectures on Japanese typography, recent projects, writing on graphic design, and the state of Design in Japan today.

• October 4, 5PM at CalArts (California Institute of the Arts), Valencia, CA Room A100
• October 5, 5PM at Otis College of Art & Design, Los Angeles, CA Ahmanson Building, 6th Floor
• October 6, 12PM at Portland State University, Portland, OR Show & Tell Lecture Series, PSU Art Annex – Room 160, 1990 SW 5th Ave, Rm. 160
• October 10, 7PM at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CARoom GC-4, Graduate Building, SF Campus

Facebook link for all events here.

Two new posters out in the Poster Initiative series: one solo and one with artist Bwana Spoons. Above: solo. Below: mit Bwana.

This is a title treatment I did a bit ago for a new short film starring pal Jai West of Survive Style 5+ fame. Coming to the big screen soon…

Wordshape fonts featured in Extensis’ latest extension of its WebINK web font service. Exciting!

I wrote a new essay for Néojaponisme about early Japanese Modernism and how the design of promotions for Onitsuka Tiger fits into the continuum of Japanese design history.

A set of the two label designs I did for Whisk-e last year. You can obtain the whiskeys here for a stunningly affordable price. The 13-year Bowmore is delightful, in particular. To have designed packaging for something of this quality is mind-boggling to me.

Nice new business cards for Joshu + Vela in San Francisco.

A quick update on my lecture tour in the U.S. in early October:

He walks. He talks. He projects his voice and waves his hands around! Glib, incisive commentary on Japanese typography, recent projects, writing on graphic design, and the state of Design in Japan today.

• October 4, 5PM at CalArts (California Institute of the Arts), Valencia, CA
• October 5, 5PM at Otis College of Art & Design, Los Angeles, CA
• October 6, 12PM at Portland State University, Portland, OR
• October 10, 7PM at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA

“Space Is The Place”
Graphic Design by Ian Lynam
Land Gallery, Portland, Oregon

Opens Friday, October 7, 2011 at 5pm

Runs through October 30, 2011

The show’s a selection of work from the past 12 years of graphic design, featuring a bevy of poster designs, music packaging, book design, broadcast design and animation and tons of odds and ends. 1,000 zine-style catalogs will be given away at the exhibition that features recent writing and some more fun/experimental assignments from the design classes I teach to balance out the design work.

Printing for the poster section of the exhibition was kindly provided by Roland Japan- giant thanks to Shimizu-san and the team!

Lots of things I’ve designed over the years will be available for sale at the show, including a brand new button set, new posters and assorted books and projects.

Land Gallery, located in the historic Mississippi Neighborhood of Portland, Oregon, features new, original work from a fantastic stable of upcoming and established independent artists.

For any more information on Land or for preview images for this show, please contact: Pat Castaldo @ 503-477-5704 or gallery@landpdx.com

Land

3925 N Mississippi Ave

Portland, OR 97227 USA
Landpdx.com

I’ll be doing a brief lecture tour while in the U.S., including lectures at CalArts and Otis in Los Angeles, CCA in San Francisco and PSU in Portland. More information on these lectures shortly.

Photos of the just-ended Arcosanti exhibition at United Bamboo Daikanyama.

I wrote a new essay titled “Japanese Modernism Reconsidered” for the latest issue of Slanted Magazine, as well as contributing my latest song and dance about Japanese typography.

You can view The Lean Alternative, a video I shot and edited with music by E*Rock to accompany the release of TOO MUCH Magazine #2 here.

The Arcosanti-themed installation for TOO MUCH Magazine opening was a smash hit. It will be open for one week. Please come down to United Bamboo in Daikanyama and have a look!

I just finished a new 50-page booklet with the unwieldy title “Prototype for an Exhibition Catalog: Recent Writing on Aesthetics with Excessive Footnotes and Some Assignments” for the Tokyo Book Art Week exhibition at Temple University Japan. The book is a collection of recent writings from Slanted Magazine, Too Much Magazine, and a few books, as well as a few as-yet unpublished pieces with some of the homework assignments from my design classes mixed in. As the title denotes, it’s a work-in-progress for my upcoming solo exhibition at Land Gallery in Portland, Oregon in October.

The exhibition will be called “Space Is The Place” and will feature a selection of graphic design work from the past 12 years of professional practice. As I approach design work from a critical perspective comprised of designing, writing and teaching, 1,000 copies of a version of this catalog will be available for free at the gallery.

I’ll have work in the pop-up Megane Zine Shop in the Lumine 2 department store from September 27 through October 31st. Big thanks to Yoshi for inviting me to participate!

Also, I’ll be participating in a group exhibition for Too Much Magazine at United Bamboo in Daikanyama starting on August 26, showing a new short film I shot and directed on Arcosanti, the Arizonan experimental architectural community. The latest issue of Too Much features a fairly massive essay I wrote about Arcosanti accompanied by drawings by Paolo Soleri, photographs by myself, my dad Bill Lynam and Cedrick Eymenier.

Stop the presses! Apparently in 2007, the website we designed for Rap-Up magazine was blessed by VH1 with the “Best Designed Website in HipHop” award via their HipHop Honors awards thingie. Who knew? (Answer: Not me.)

I have chunk of work in the new book Logology 2: The Wonderland of Logo Design, published by Victionary.

The official blurb from the publisher:

Attending to an international audience overwhelmed by data and information, the new logo generation answers the urge for speed communication and recognition in both the physical and digital world. More than just a mark to differentiate between producers in a crowded market, logos today embrace efficiency and flexibility to fit extensive applications and take on a new significance to intrigue, explain and instruct. Can its making be as simple as it looks?

Displaying more than 1600 logos from 500 designers worldwide, Logology® 2 systematically contrasts the principle theme, structure, composition and palette of the world’s latest logo designs under 78 classes. It pictures a wonderland of logotypes, graphic icons, mascots and trademarks that have taken on a new significance to intrigue, explain and instruct as corporate logos, signs, favicons or decorations on the internet or in the real world. Alongside the tremendous showcase are 15 case studies where selected designers walked us through their creative process for the branding and rebranding of businesses, public bodies and non-profits. Branding experts, Frédéric Vanhorenbeke from Coast Design and Holger Jacobs at Mind Design, have shared their views and experiences respectively in the forewords for this book.

Just finished our first big project for Google. No, we can’t talk about it. Yes, we are indebted to the folks who brought us on board!

The past two weeks found me traveling to Kobe to shoot a handful of spots for Onitsuka Tiger, following ASICS/Onitsuka Tiger Europe’s digital content producer (and all around awesome dude!) Mutaurwa Mapondera as he interviewed five influential individuals from the brand’s history.

His first interview was with Mr. Uetsuki, the original head of Marketing and Promotions for Onitsuka Tiger. Super-interesting guy with lots to say and amazing sketches for logos, product concepts and the thickest pile of passports from his years of crossing the globe promoting the brand.

Mutaurwa is documenting our time together exploring Onitsuka Tiger’s history and legacy on his blog. Recommended reading!

I just teamed up with copywriter extraordinaire Chad Rea to produce a new trio of posters for Electricity Showroom, a brand spanking new poster retailer out of Portland. Each is printed in two colors, limited edition and signed by us.

100% pure typography. Uncoated paper. Hand-pulled.

So, due to some wackiness, the name of the free fonts created for Onitsuka Tiger were changed from Kihachiro Geometric Sans and Kihachiro Swash to Kirimomi Geometric Sans and Kihachiro Swash a few days after launch. The dust is settled and the fonts are currently burning up the charts over at MyFonts, where they are available for FREE!

I’m happy to announce that my type foundry Wordshape has also partnered with Fontspring and our fonts will be available from them soon!

I wrote the foreword for a new book titled Type Player 2 published in the Americas by Gingko Press and in Asia by Sandu Media.

Wordshape fonts are now being carried by FontDeck.

Wordshape fonts are now being distributed by ITC/Monotype.

We’ll be attending Zine’s Mate / The Tokyo Art Book Fair under our guise as Wordshape, type foundry/publisher/distributor on the 16th, 17th & 18th of July at 3331 Arts in Chiyoda. More info here.

The Wordshape booth will have loads of rare and hard-to-find books and projects published by Microcosm, Sound Screen Design, A Few Warm Stones, Seibundo Shinkosha (Idea Magazine), Hot/Cold Press, Dill Pickle Club, Bathysphere Books, Scout Books and more! Come on by!

My new typefaces for Onitsuka Tiger, Kirimomi Swash and Kirimomi Sans are now available via MyFonts for FREE.

Kiyonori Muroga and I wrote the introduction for Idea Magazine’s latest book, Design of Manga, Anime & Light Novels, available here. The book is a collection of exciting packaging and editorial design for otaku-centric endeavors.

I’ll be presenting at TypeCon in New Orleans on Saturday July 9th at 2pm.
Details:
http://www.typecon.com/program

Two FREE fonts published via Néojaponisme X Onitsuka Tiger. You can download them here.

I have two new essays in the latest issue of Germany’s Slanted Magazine. One essay is a retrospective on the work of the late Japanese designer Kiyoshi Awazu while the second is the fourth installment in my series on Japanese typography. This time around I talk about kanji, linguistic development and the modification of kanji using kana.

Tokyo folks can find Slanted at Logos bookstore in Parco 2, situated in the basement.

Wordshape webfonts are now offered with WebINK, the hosted webfont service from Extensis (makers of Suitcase). Check out the collection here!

The new fonts I designed for Onitsuka Tiger, Kirimomi Geometric Sans and Kirimomi Swash, are featured in the new issue of Idea Magazine (the primary part of the new issue is a fantastic overview of the work of designer Bunpei Yorifuji – amazing!). Issue 347 features the first full showing of the typeface’s complete character set and a lengthy essay about the development of each font in Japanese.

As the text is Japanese-only, here is the English version of the essay for international readers:

The Kirimomi Typeface family
by Ian Lynam

For the past year I’ve been working on a new type design project with the Japanese sports fashion brand Onitsuka Tiger in conjunction with my online journal Néojaponisme. I sat down with some folks at Onitsuka Tiger’s office in Tokyo to pore over the company’s vast archives of print advertising from the company’s advent in 1949 through today, and to draw inspiration as I pleased for the design of a pair of digital fonts that help tell the story of Onitsuka Tiger as a brand.

Looking through the hundreds of ads, catalogs, brochures and assorted other materials, it became immediately clear that there was a bigger story to be told — the Onitsuka Tiger materials span the technological and cultural development of Modern printing. The typography and graphic design of Onitsuka Tiger’s assorted printed materials provided a myriad of potential jumping-off points that span both Japanese and Western history, revealing a startling series of commonalities as well as interesting divergent moments in time.

From classical influence to highly futuristic, there is a huge gamut of interesting sources to pull from. Onitsuka Tiger’s printed promotions started in the age of metal typesetting, took advantage of phototype compositing in the 1960s through the 1980s, then entered the digital realm in the the late 1980s. As a Japanese company that marketed domestically and abroad, the marketing department had to be aware of typographic trends internationally, and this was reflected in their printed materials. From the prevalence of American Type Founders typefaces used in early advertising mixed with hand lettering to incised prototype katakana and hiragana to the Helveticization of the globe, Onitsuka Tiger’s printed matter functions as a cultural and aesthetic survey of popular styles and unique approaches to graphic design.

The two fonts created for this project are:

Kirimomi Swash
A display typeface which is rooted in both classical form and the sharp edges of photoype lettering. The typeface looks back to the historic forms of French typefounder Jean Jannon for it’s base, as well as the curved terminals and weighty serifs of the work of William Caslon. The various interpretations of their work throughout history have been applied to give each letterform presence, stability and rigidity. Sharp phototype swashes culled from the logo for Emperor, a line of golf shoes released by Onitsuka Tiger thirty-plus years ago have been applied to give the face a timeliness of the Modern/Postmodern era, offsetting the historical skeletal frame.

Kirimomi Swash is first and foremost a display face, and in order for it to function gracefully, a number of ligatures and alternate characters have been included. It is intentionally not designed for text setting, as that would require a smoothing-out of the most prominent elements, and the result would most likely be a typeface that while potentially being useful, would not stand out in a crowd.

Kirimomi Geometric Sans

A sans serif inspired by early geometric typefaces and the horizontal directionality of phototype text, yet designed to render immaculately on-screen and in print. This geometric sans owes a deep debt to Roger Excoffon’s 1962 typeface Antique Olive, as much as to contemporary interpretations of Paul Renner’s Futura, the near geometric rounded characters pinched and squeezed for readability.

Antique Olive’s S and s were indicative of brush track twists, having an overly large top story giving it the appearance of almost being upside-down. While many continue to question this move, as Antique Olive was meant to be the French contender for the sans serif crown being vied for by Univers and Helvetica and “failed” due to it’s strong personality, these strong nuances help convey a vivacity and liveliness missing from so much of contemporary sans serif type design. Excoffon’s idiosyncratic moves are mirrored in aspects of Kirimomi Geometric Sans – the scooped top of the lowercase i and j mirror their dotted elements; the whole face has a very large x-height; and terminals are sliced off, creating a distinctively sharp visual impression. The sliced serifs and terminals give the face a horizontal thrust that pushes readers’ eyes forward in lines of text.

Aspects of Kirimomi Geometric Sans veer wildly from these inspirational starting points: the lowercase a being double-storied, the optical “dazzle” of it’s predecessors toned down, and the entire typeface carefully kerned for optimum results in text setting. A number of alternate capitals and ligatures are included for the best possible results, including OpenType auto-substitution for all OpenType-enabled applications.

A number of pattern-making glyphs have been drawn and included in lieu of traditional typographic ornament within each of these fonts. Contemporary font technology allows the deployment of pattern elements in a regulated environment, allowing designers to control the amount of space in side bearings. When typeset and leading/line-height is adjusted, one can create smooth, even patterns, choose coloring and adjust scale quickly without having to resort to external files.

A series of posts and essays that document the development of these typefaces and their cultural relevance to the continuum of type design, as well as a lengthy essay about the co-development of Japanese and Western type design will debut on Néojaponisme. Accompanying these essays will be these digital fonts (as well as @font-face CSS web kits), available for free download in the upcoming month.

Out now: the bold italic weight of Clobber Grotesk, a typeface family that I have been plugging away at for the past few years. Clobber Grotesk is a sans serif typeface family designed for high readability. It includes a range of weights and a stencil variant. The terminals of the letterforms are slightly flared in order to increase legibility. The family-to-date includes these weights:

• Light
• Regular
• Regular Italic
• Medium
• DemiBold
• Bold
• Bold Italic
• Bold Stencil

Available via Wordshape and MyFonts.

Out now: the regular italic weight of Clobber Grotesk, a humanist grotesk family I’ve sporadically worked on for years. You can pick it up from Wordshape here.

We are currently cranking away on an updated identity for PechaKucha Night globally. Here’s a preview of the new logo.

Some big news here: Ian Lynam Design has a brand spanking new business partner, Yuki Kameguchi. Since moving to Tokyo from her native Fukuoka, Yuki has worked across a broad variety of media, most recently at IMG SRC Group, one of the top web development production companies in Tokyo. There, Yuki handled double duty: public relations and project management.

We’re really excited to have Yuki handling project management and new business development here at the studio with Paul, Thien, Hisae and I. Exciting times! By doubling up our ability to handle projects in native Japanese and native English, good things are bound to happen!

I have a few design projects that’ll be featured in the upcoming biennial United Designs in Cyprus next month. Thanks to Jen McKnight and Albert Inyoung Choi for looking out for a brother!

We just retrofitted the LePigeon website with a handy javascript-based image viewer in lieu of the ol’ Flash one. Congrats to Gabriel Rucker for winning a James Beard Rising Star Chef of the Year Award!

I have a handful of new font releases out now via Wordshape and MyFonts.

First up: Adora Medium.

Adora Bold

Walter Tracy’s AdSans has been enjoying a resurgence in popularity over the past decade, in no small part from the digital revivals employed by Dutch designer Karel Martens. Adora is a revival of Tracy’s design, but with more attention paid to spacing and kerning for smooth text setting. It has a large x-height and reads well at small point sizes. A range of ligatures have been created for smooth text-setting and detailed display work. Two bonus modular pattern characters are included, custom-spaced so that designers can create seamless patterns to accompany typography using Adora, or to be used as a standalone design feature.

Both weights are available for immediate download from Wordshape and MyFonts.

Effete

Effete is a metropolitan titling typeface, similar in weight and proportion to fonts like Imre Reiner’s Corvinus, but both more expressive and less goofy. Available from Wordshape and MyFonts.

The Inspire Japan site just got a bit of a facelift and a backend retrofit.