AQ

This Spring: Tokyo Art Map + Marunouchi Art Weeks + TAB Talks

Chris Palmieri — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 04:59:41 +0000

Spring has arrived here in Tokyo, and for AQ that means nightly strolls through nearby Yasukuni Shrine to grab a warm beer out of the cooler, some yakitori off the grill, and gaze at the popcorn-like cherry blossoms against the dark sky.

The timing couldn’t be more perfect to catch our breath, as we’ve wrapped up our work for a few fun events, also blossoming across town throughout April. Her

Tokyo Art Map

We’ve been working with Tokyo Art Beat since the beginning of the year to launch a new series of bi-monthly, bilingual art event maps for Tokyo. This is TAB’s first major step offline, and so far it’s been a great success, with 100,000 copies distributed throughout Tokyo, and all the ad spaces sold out for this edition.

The map wouldn’t have been possible without the support of Marunouchi, a commercial district of Tokyo owned by Mitsubishi’s real estate division. Marunouchi has organized a great lineup of art events under the name of Marunouchi Art Weeks, which are neatly summarized within the map, and mirrored on the mini-site we designed for them last month

Marunouchi Art Weeks

In addition to the map, we were recruited by Marunouchi to design all promotion materials for Marunouchi Art Weeks, including a mini-site, flags, hanging from hundreds of street-lamps throughout central Tokyo, and B1-sized subway posters hanging in the train station beneath Marunouchi Building.

TAB Talks #4 “Christian Schwartz: Type Designer”

On April 8th (next Tuesday), Chris will be hosting the next TAB Talks, featuring a presentation and Q&A with type designer Christian Schwartz. Christian has created custom typefaces for publications and companies like Esquire, Wallpaper*, The New York Times, Bosch and Deutsche Bahn. His typefaces for the Guardian were an integral part of the newspaper’s acclaimed redesign in 2005.

The talk will be held in English with Japanese translation, at Gotanda Sonic in Gotanda. Hope to see you there!

Party: Hitotoki Hitoban

Chris Palmieri — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 10:05:30 +0000

Hitotoki Tokyo is throwing our first ever reading event, Hitotoki Hitoban (one moment, one night) on Tuesday, Jan 29th at 7pm at The Pink Cow in Shibuya. Please join us for a night of food, drinks, friends and stories.

If you’ve got a Tokyo story you’d like to share at the party, please get in touch.

Update: Thanks to the hundred or so Hitotoki friends and fans who came, we’re hoping to do another one in a few months. In the meantime, here are some photos from the event. We have some new cities coming up later this month, so hang tight.

Get Firefox Video Awards: Start voting!

Chris Palmieri — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 06:36:56 +0000

We’ve been working on a video contest site for Firefox for the last few months, calling on Japan’s creative community to contribute short videos to help expand the reach of the famous open-source browser Firefox in Japan.

Well, the galleries just opened, and there are some really clever videos in the running. We don’t like to play favorites, but here’s an early entry that made us all laugh:

Six Recipe Sites: Taste-tested

Chris Palmieri — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 03:44:43 +0000

We at AQ love to bake, steam, stew, chop, and peel, and eat; we spend about as much time talking about food as we do about design. So we decided to see what happens when the two meet, by dissecting a handful of the most popular recipe sites. Bon appétit!

All Recipes

http://allrecipes.com/

Wooden Spoon rating:
If All Recipes was a chef it would be: Your mom

Umai! (tasty!)

Postcard-sized printouts show respect offline traditions - Chris
Handy shopping-list tool keeps you from forgetting that crucial sprig of cilantro. - Paul
Cook of the week shows appreciation for valuable user contribution. - Christophe
It’s easy to compare recipes with user-ratings built right into the search results. - Eiko
Amount converter for US/Metric and number of Servings. - Chris
Ingredient Search reveals recipes matching the contents of your fridge. - Paul
Nutritional information is dynamically generated for many recipes. - Christophe

Needs salt:

These user-generated recipes have a limited repertoire: an American home-cookin’ slant, with no easy way to find exotic alternatives. - Chris
Too many links everywhere kills your appetite. - Paul
Bland color scheme and simple presentation don’t lead your eyes to important areas. - Christophe
Red-orange color scheme too close to the color of food. - Chris
Top navigation lacks the umph to carry this dish. - Christophe

Cook Pad

http://www.cookpad.com

Wooden Spoon rating:
If CookPad was a chef it’d be: The neighbor’s wife: folksy, with that easy-to-love homemade touch, but lacks some refinement.

Umai!

Step-by-step photos keep you from losing the script midway. - Eiko
Users can subscribe to other users’ favorite recipe lists, one of several ways CookPad keeps a tight community. - Christophe
“Tsukurepo” user reports allow the community to discuss how the recipe worked for them and how improvements and improvisations can be made. - Eiko

Needs Salt:

Gloomy colour choices for the interface and poor photography make me want to go and eat at McDonald’s - Paul
Search refinement choices are too limited. - Christophe
Putting high-ranking recipes behind a pay firewall, limiting new visitors to the worst content, sounds like a recipe for failure. - Chris
Brewing controversy over the originality of user recipes threatens to quickly poison this melting pot. - Paul

Food Network

http://www.foodnetwork.com/

Wooden Spoon rating:
If Food Network was a chef it’d be: Rachael Ray, a little familiar, a little bland

Umai!

Progressivelyu narrow search results by ingredient, type of dish, type of cuisine, etc. - Chris
“Commonly-searched keywords” is a handy touch. - Eiko

Needs salt:

Fatty Javascript and Flash sends my browser into cardiac arrest. - Christophe
Recipe pages have poor hierarchy. The main recipe text is tiny and unformatted, while huge titles for other recipes steal the show. - Chris
Uninspiring photography - Chris

Open Source Food

http://www.opensourcefood.com/

Wooden Spoon rating:
If Open Source Food was a chef it’d be: your teenage brother: more experimental than mom, but can’t cook for crowds and sometimes lights the kitchen on fire.

Umai!

This site could totally become the most delicious dating site around. - Paul
Individual User pages give the content a personable touch. - Christophe
Creative Commons License make it easier to share your recipes. - Chris
Easy-to-use peer review elements. - Christophe
Nice big photos - Paul
Tips section lets users to share kitchen secrets that don’t fit neatly in one recipe. - Chris
Uncluttered interface lets the recipes sing. - Paul

Needs salt:

This black color scheme doesn’t do these delicious-looking recipes any justice. - Eiko
No way to do all but the simplest keyword and genre searches. - Chris
Who wants to go through 39 pages of Western-influenced dishes. Needs more powerful ways to filter content. How about “Sexy recipes”, “Get-Well-Soon recipes”, “Make-The-Kids-Sleepy recipes”… - Paul
No real sense of how fresh the content is. - Paul
Succulent data is begging to be cut by a sharper search interface. - Christophe

Epicurious

http://www.epicurious.com/

Wooden Spon rating:
If epicurious was a chef it would be: Gordon Ramsay: sophisticated and bold, maybe a little overaggressive.

Umai!

Attractive and vibrant rotating color scheme. - Christophe
Mail to your cellphone let’s you take your recipes to the supermarket. - Chris
Those are some tasty-lookin’ icons! - Eiko
Personal notes on recipe pages helps you keep track of your own improvisations. - Chris
Video area with lots of content, supported by well-targeted ads. - Christophe

Needs salt:

Important links like “My recipe box” tucked under pesky drop down menu. - Chris
It’s hard to cook off the screen with half the recipe below the fold. It’s hard to scroll with flour-caked hands! - Eiko
Pacing is a little off: it seems like my table is being stacked with too many options at one time. - Christophe
The user ratings look shady without any rating counts to back them up. - Eiko

+ 1 : AQ welcomes Christophe Sautot

Chris Palmieri — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 08:26:31 +0000

The AQ team just got a little taller. We proudly announce our latest addition, Christophe Sautot.

Christophe literally showed up on our doorstep last winter, a bushy-tailed new grad from Santa Barbara, ready to explore Japan and dig into some serious web development.

The timing couldn’t have been better. Our design ideas had been outpacing in-house programming abilities, and while outsourcing is always an option, there is nothing better than working side by side with a developer who shares your vision and drive.

Christophe understands how code and design work together to make or break people’s experience with a website. He has the curiousity to find a way to make almost anything happen, and the discipline to find the cleanest solution. Needless to say, we couldn’t be happier.

CBC-net Interview: Khoi Vinh

Chris Palmieri — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 08:48:17 +0000

Last week I interviewed Khoi Vinh for the popular Japanese design portal CBC-net. The interview was published in Japanese only, but here is the English for all the single-byte readers out there.

Khoi Vinh is the design director for The New York Times website. He is also cofounder of the design journal “A Brief Message.” A Brief Message differs from other regularly updated journals in that all entries are both brief and “art directed.” Its layout changes with each weekly issue, marrying evocative illustrations with short essays by prominent voices in the design community, in a clever combination of balancing strict grids with fluidity through CSS and other HTML techniques.

Until 2005 Vinh was a cofounder of the award winning NYC based web design firm Behavior. Behavior was responsible for such large-scale redesign as The Onion, which proved high style and high usability can be achieved with just the fundamentals of graphic design: strong typography; precise grid systems and clear hierarchy. His websites often use just a few colors and a few typefaces at a few sizes, yet they often support complex information structures and layout variations.

The community response to A Brief Message has been almost universally positive. Not only for the brevity and poignancy of the content, but also for the daring shift in mindset towards layout and narrative. Now that the battle for usability, web standards and accessibility has been largely won, this is undoubtedly a next step in the evolution of the web.

On Subtraction, you identify a mission for A Brief Message: to transcend “decorated databases” and bring art direction to the web. What inspired this idea?

I’ve been thinking about this issue for a long time, mostly because at The New York Times I work in an environment with both print and Web designers and the differences between the two job descriptions can be dramatic. But going back almost two years, I wrote a blog post about this topic.

A Brief Message is an experiment to see if it’s practical to bring some of the values of traditional graphic design online. That means working with illustrators and trying to remake each page so that it reflects the content that particular article is presenting — much like a printed magazine. It may very well not be possible because of the way the Web works. Either way, it’s worth a try, because if it’s successful, I think it will be influential in how this medium evolves.

Are there aspects of “the way the Web works” that you felt working against you as you tried applying these print design techniques to A Brief Message?

Well, by and large, the Web is not nearly as much of a medium for narrative as print is. Which means that people want to consume information online in as expedient and useful a manner as possible, which explains why so many people use email forwarding, RSS, and will link to the printer-friendly versions of articles. They’re essentially extracting the information that’s useful to them, and leaving behind the narrative presentation.

With A Brief Message, we’re saying there’s real value in the presentation (i.e., the illustrations and layouts), but we’re not being obstinate about it. You can get the full text of every Message via RSS feed (in Atom format, actually) and we’re keeping the coding very semantically correct by using CSS and non-obtrusive markup to implement the presentation. The content is what matters. So, as much as we’re invested in A Brief Message as an experiment for great illustration, I wouldn’t consider it a failure if ultimately our audience says that they only care about the content. I hope that’s not the case, but I’ll be happy if our content resonates with our audience.

You’ve written how the length and frequency of A.B.M articles allows you an unusually high level of attention paid to each one, quite a different working condition from your job at NYTimes.com. Can you describe how design work is different at sites as big as NYTimes.com?

If I had to sum it up: everything is bigger: more content, more variations, more people involved. It’s a lot more about building relationships with people so that you can work together to get things done. Learning how to work productively with people is the biggest design aid of all.

When you were first hired for the job, you described an affinity among your own strengths and the design challenges of NYTimes.com, specifically “lots of text, presented in as elegant a manner as possible and with a minimum of ornamentation”. Can you point to a recently designed project which really put your text-oriented design instincts to work?

Have a look at our work on the series “Choking on Growth,” which is a tailor-made presentation of a big investigative piece on China’s environmental situation. It’s a synthesis of image, multimedia and extensive reporting that, hopefully, creates a coherent user experience.

Looking into the future, do you see any changes in the way websites are made that might open up the door for the art directorial values of A.B.M. to be applied more regularly?

People tend to think that this is solely a technical challenge, that we’re waiting on just the right WYSIWYG tool that will allow us to lay out the Web the way InDesign lets us lay out a printed page. And that’s true, in part — I don’t yet see any technological tool on the horizon that will allow for that, but when it comes it will play a critical part in allowing us to take on a more art directorial approach to online design.

But the second, more crucial part is the economic viability of such a role. Right now it’s just not financially efficient to devote too much energy to art directing online, because everything needs to move so quickly and because businesses can’t wait for art direction to be done before publishing. We’re still in an economically early stage for online media; when an online business can bring in significantly more money per employee than they can right now, I think we’ll see a greater desire for the values that art direction brings to the table.

Do you have any future projects you’re working on that continue in this thread?

For sure, but I can’t talk about them now!

Thanks Khoi!

Kurikku - TAB 3rd Anniversary Flyer

Chris Palmieri — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 09:52:21 +0000

If you follow Tokyo’s art scene and you’re RSS-reader is working properly, you probably already know about TAB’s upcoming party “Kurikku” at Super Deluxe. We’re looking forward to the big event just like you, but for the last few week’s it’s been all about the flyer.

After a few false-starts with off-season themes, we stepped on a Kurikku (A pun on the Japanese for chestnut (Kuri) and the word “click”). Eiko went out and bought a handful of them, spikes and all, and many pricked pinky fingers and mouse-kurikkus later, we were finished.

Look out for the flyers around town, and see you on the big night!

p.s. Kuri eating tip: To avoid getting the spikes stuck in your fingers, peel back the shell with the soles of your sneakers.

Boris Yeltsin, Orphan Annie and the Port Authority

Chris Palmieri — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 06:10:58 +0000

As of midnight last night, Hitotoki New York is up and running, with eight excellent stories crossing three boroughs, and bringing together an unlikely cast of characters, well, unlikely in any place other than New York.

In between pulling together content and wrestling with code, we also found time to do a illustrations for a handful of stories, including the one you see above.

Thanks to all the writers for throwing their vote of confidence behind this idea and Matt Rand for climbing aboard to make their stories sparkle.

Hitotoki is a collaboration between AQ and fearless publishers Chin Music Press.

New Article on CBCnet

Chris Palmieri — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 02:32:08 +0000

For anyone who’s been following our series of interviews, it’s already clear that I’m on a type kick these days. Well yesterday, I took the show on the road, with my first article for CBCnet, “a creative portal site which gathers information of Art and Design from various fields”, and one of the most read Japanese-language design sites. I’ll be writing an article a month for CBCnet, including a few interviews, a thing or two about bilingual web design, and maybe a thing or two about type.

This first article, “The Case for New Type”, is a friendly call to Japanese designers to explore typefaces by today’s type designers. It briefly covers the stylistic and technical changes in the state of the art and introduces a handful of great typefaces I’ve yet to see in use here in Tokyo.

Thanks to CBCnet for letting me crash for a little while, Yosuke and Eiko for help with the translation, and the type designers for giving me a peek into how they do what they do.

Facetime 6: Type Designer Nikola Djurek on Amalia

Chris Palmieri — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 08:55:46 +0000

For many Japanese designers, the cultural and historical nuances of Western typefaces can seem obscure, making choosing a typeface a daunting task. As a result, many Japanese designers stick with familiar favorites like Helvetica or Garamond, or grasp at decorative fonts that lose their flavor after a few bites.

This series was originally conceived for Japanese designers, to introduce well-crafted Western fonts and the contemporary designers behind them. In the end though, we enjoyed these interviews so much ourselves, we decided to publish them in the English too.

Amalia (2006)

Nikloa Djurek,
Typonine
Zabok, Croatia

What was your inspiration for this typeface?

Amalia developed naturally from practice sessions writing with a pointed pen. Soon after, I designed the first, one-weight digital version, and then completed the family with three more weights and some final adjustments to the original design.

The typeface was named after my grandmother Amalia, who was extremely handy with a pointed pen and embroidered her sketches into table cloths.

Serif families usually have fewer weights than sans-serifs, but Amalia has four nicely unified weights. How did you go about designing the heavier weights?

For a text typeface, you really don’t need a lot of weights, but I wanted Amalia to also be used as a display face, thus the extra weights.

After designing a normal and bold weight, I used the software Superpolator by Erik van Blokland to create intermediate weights.

I started to use Superpolator during its early test stages a few years ago. Erik van Blokland was my teacher at the time, so I was very interested in using it in my work. During my design process, I was dealing with lot of variants like x-heights, stenciled, many weights and heights. Superpolator helps you manipulate all these things, so it was logical for me to use it.

Of course there’s always a need for fine tuning by hand, especially if some details change drastically from one extreme to the other, but these can easily be controlled by Superpolator.

Another important tool for me is prepolator by Tal Leming. This software prepares masters so they are compatible before you use Superpolator’s Robofab interpolation.

What are some of the ideal uses for Amalia?

Amalia is great for composing text like poetry and novels, but I’ve seen people use it for very different things like annual reports and CD covers. I’ve been quite happy to see it used in ways I never would.

Which single character do you love the most in Amalia?

This is a hard question, and I think I have an answer. I’m more interested in the small details. For example, the asymettrical, slightly curved serifs, add a liveliness, especially with the pointed pen, where details are already very playful.

Do you have a favorite typeface, or one that has influenced you the most?

Rather than a typeface, I think my surroundings have influenced me the most. I lived in The Hague and studied at the Royal Acadamy of Art (Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten) in the Type & Media post graduate program, where I learned from some amazing teachers and a great type history (both from The Hague and Netherlands).

The Hague, KABK and Type & Media are for sure amazing places to be if you are interested in typography, especially type design. Their great type history and teaching methods (Gerrit Noordzij must be mentioned here) from writing to stone carving to the most current digital tools make a complete circle for anyone who wants to become a professional type designer.

Amalia is available at OurType.

AQ

This Spring: Tokyo Art Map + Marunouchi Art Weeks + TAB Talks

Tokyo Art Map

Marunouchi Art Weeks

TAB Talks #4 “Christian Schwartz: Type Designer”

Party: Hitotoki Hitoban

Get Firefox Video Awards: Start voting!

Six Recipe Sites: Taste-tested

All Recipes

Umai! (tasty!)

Needs salt:

Cook Pad

Umai!

Needs Salt:

Food Network

Umai!

Needs salt:

Open Source Food

Umai!

Needs salt:

Epicurious

Umai!

Needs salt:

+ 1 : AQ welcomes Christophe Sautot

CBC-net Interview: Khoi Vinh

Kurikku - TAB 3rd Anniversary Flyer

Boris Yeltsin, Orphan Annie and the Port Authority

New Article on CBCnet

Facetime 6: Type Designer Nikola Djurek on Amalia

Amalia (2006)

Nikloa Djurek, TyponineZabok, Croatia

Other Articles in this series

Nikloa Djurek,
Typonine
Zabok, Croatia