For some time now, I have been on the lookout for examples of Japanese street art. The uncanny means by which Japan adapts Western culture, reprocesses it and then spins it out as something altogether hyperreal, combined with the ever-prevalent superflat movement suggested that there must exist something extraordinary in the darker corners of the Tokyo streets.
So it was great to read PingMag’s recent piece on The Ghetto, a former love hotel in Shin-Okubo that has been converted into a skater shop/graffiti space. The article also provided links to …

I always tend to venture beyond the local borders when it comes to searching for inspiration, looking to what is big in Japan, or germinating in the New York streets or rising out of Europe. So it was a pleasant surprise to find myself spending a good chunk of my afternoon pouring over the work of local designer Marian Bantjes.
With a whimsical and organic style that suggests that she spends more time with a pen and paper than in front of a computer screen, Marian has been described by …

You know that you are a true design geek when you are listening to Doyald Young recount the moment in 1950′s Paris when Adrian Frutiger showed him the early drafts of a font called Univers, and you have goosebumps on your arm.
Last night’s talk by Mr. Young, a legend and master of typography and logo design was full of such moments as he showed samples of his utterly perfect hand drawn wordmarks and shared the wisdom of a sixty-year career in graphic design to a packed house at the HR …

A posting on Coudal’s Fresh Signals caught my eye and imagination this afternoon. It was regarding Alphabet 26, a simplified English alphabet system designed by American type designer Bradbury Thompson in 1950. The underlying concept is a sound one: “it is misleading for a letter, or for any graphic symbol, to have two different designs.” Of the 26 letters in the English alphabet, 19 use different symbols for uppercase and lowercase while the other 6 use similar ones. Bradley eliminated what he deemed the extraneous symbols and created the system …

In my attempt to dissuade a client from her preference toward the font Arial, I came across a wonderful account of this homely typeface’s origin and proliferation titled The Scourge of Arial over on Mark Simonson’s site.
In short, Arial is like an invasive species, the English Ivy to the font world’s Stanley Park. We need to rip it out by the roots.