Chapter 8 of Curing Japan's America Addiction as seen through the eyes of Wordle, a word cloud generator created by Jonathan Feinberg.

CJAA will be available for purchase in a few weeks time.

Khoi Vinh over at Subtraction has written a lovely and flattering short review of Art Space Tokyo:

Whenever it is that I’ll finally get an opportunity to make it to Japan, I plan to take with me a copy of “Art Space Tokyo,” an unexpectedly stunning bit of cultural travelogue from Chin Music Press...

We've also updated our Tokyo Art Map offerings with a new PDF download for Ghibli Museum near Kichijoji.

There are a few other AST related magazine articles, web interviews and party updates that we'll be announcing in the coming weeks. For now though, we have to keep our heads down and continue cranking out Curing Japan's America Addiction.

We're at the point where we are starting to grow but still seem constantly strapped for cash. Every upstanding businessperson knows that there's only one solution to keep us growing: Interns, interns, interns!

So if you're looking for long hours of hard, anonymous work, if you're dream is to talk on the phone with a writer who is pretty ticked off that his book isn't in the Tacoma Barnes & Noble, if you'd like nothing better than to spend your summer trudging to the post office to mail off elaborately packaged cans of coffee or if picking up my egg salad sandwich on your way back from Office Max to stock up on padded envelopes sounds like almost too much fun, then don't hesitate to give us a buzz at 206-784-4700.

In all seriousness, we have an array of potential positions and assignments to offer ranging from low pay to no pay. We're looking for production people (web designers, graphic designers, editors, proofreaders), marketing and sales people and maybe an MBA student or two who want to show us all the basic business mistakes we make every day (and lord knows, there are a lot of them). At this point, none of these positions are full-time (I believe it's illegal to have full-time nonpaid interns, is it not?), but you never know — if we keep on this pace, we'll be able to add staff in the not-too-distant future.

Also, while some of our jobs require people to be in the Puget Sound area, others could be done from Timbuktu. Don't let geography dissuade you.

So call us, send your resume to me at bruce at chin music press dot com, and we'll take it from there.

While reading an article on the design process for FF Meta Serif, I came across this passage which struck me as particularly hilarious. If you can understand this, you probably know too much about typography for your own good.

Kris was more inclined to turn Meta Serif into a slab – a pretty literal take – basically Meta with ever so slightly trapezoidal serifs tacked on. Christian’s sketch took it firmly into Antiqua territory (‘Antiqua’ being the common German name for serif faces, as opposed to ‘Grotesk’ which means sans serif) by increasing the contrast and adding bracketed serifs. Christian tried to keep as many of the salient features intact as he could, yet his design was definite departure from Meta. The slab was closer to what Erik and Christian had discussed in the past, but Christian’s grand plan (and the underlying reason why he thought Meta Serif should be an Antiqua) was to draw Unit Slab as well, and let that one be a real Egyptian. That way they would end up with a serif and slab that could be used together and be compatible with both FF Meta and FF Unit.

Taking a 10 second breather from working on Art Space Tokyo. As an experiment in geekism meets book-dorkdom, I'll be twittering production/design notes on the book. Follow if you dare!

There's a wonderful copy of a recent TV show about Japanese book designer Shin Sobue available on You Tube. It's in Japanese so you may not catch all the nuances, but it offers a good peek into the "otaku" style workspace and ethic of Japanese creatives.

The main portion of the video revolves around Sobue trying to produce an "inside out" book. That is, where the endpapers are on the outside and the cover on the inside. The men in suits are from the bindery and, to say the least, not particularly enthusiastic about the idea. Mainly because they won't be able to guarantee the integrity of the finished product. Anyone who has tried to design something that pushes the production standards can understand the breathless trepidation of seeing his "vision" fulfilled that Sobue is so clearly feeling in that meeting.

I think my favorite scene is with Sobue at the book bindery where he pulls a piece off the production line and sends a shiver of worry into the workforce of the factory.

It's too bad we don't see the end product. And I partly wonder if the book ever got made. Or maybe it's yet to be published. I feel a book like that would be prominently displayed in the new releases section and I've yet to see it in my regular bookstore visits over the last couple of months.

Anyway, a fascinating little documentary into the Japanese bookmaking world.

It's out. It's ugly. And its reception has been somewhat luke-warm. Then again, when the first generation iPod came out, people laughed, spat and declared it an abject failure. Here's some ramblings from the bloggerheads:

Mr. Pilgrim:

You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

Mr. Greenfield:

Unless something comes along to radically reorient my thinking, I’m willing to bet Chris Heathcote has nailed it in eighteen words: “Kindle is what happens when a non-cool company attempts to do a closed service: a car crash.”

Mr. Godin:

The challenge that my hero Jeff Bezos has is that if he's really really lucky, he'll sell a million of these things in a year. And that means that at $10 a book, you need to have significant market share to make an impact. The Sony reader has been out for months and it has sold, perhaps, a few thousand units.

Mr. The Reader

Mr. Fireball

So the Kindle proposition is this: You pay for downloadable books that can’t be printed, can’t be shared, and can’t be displayed on any device other than Amazon’s own $400 reader — and whether they’re readable at all in the future is solely at Amazon’s discretion. That’s no way to build a library.

Mr. Kawasaki

I have used it and if someone gave me a choice of receiving an iPhone or a Kindle, I’d pick the Kindle.

Updates:

Here's a couple sources with more specific details on the Kindle:
15 Things I Just Learned About the Amazon Kindle (Boing Boing)
Many Details About The Kindle (Engadget)

This is the week that Amazon releases Kindle, their new electronic book reader to the public. We should be somewhat excited — if for no other reason than to see what a progressive company can do with eInk technology. Sony has had a four-year head start on producing electronic readers and distributing electronic books and, not unlike most things at 21st century Sony, they've all but botched it. I'm in my 20s, surrounded by tech savvy and literary types, live in Japan, and don't know anyone (not one person) who owns a Sony Reader — they've failed.

Amazon, despite the publishing industry's love-hate relationship with them (we love them for ship-ship-shipping our books all over the place; we hate them for selling our books for penny-profits thus undermining anyone else [including direct sales from publishers like us] trying to make a profit selling books), you can't deny they've affected the industry more than anyone else — certainly in the online realm if not also in distribution.

So what's up with the Kindle? Here's the shortlist:

- 10.3 ounces
- 30 hours (max) battery life
- Retail: $399
- 167 dot-per-inch display
- Uses typeface Caecilia for body text
- Design inspired by both the year 1982 and the film War Games
- Wireless (not just WiFi but a ubiquitous, work-anywhere (only in America one presumes) network called Whispernet)
- Browses the web
- New releases and Hardcovers for $9.99
- Old books for much much less
- First chapters for free

A quick type-dork note on Caecilia, from the Veer type notes page:

This Linotype typeface was designed in 1990 by Peter Matthias Noordzij (PMN), and named for his wife, Caecilia. Because its shapes are humanist rather than geometric, PMN Caecilia is easier on the reader’s eye and so more useful as a text typeface than most slab serif designs.

Some quotes (and notes) from the Newsweek article on Kindle:

Regarding the wireless connectivity:

'Some of those features have been available on previous e-book devices, notably the Sony Reader. The Kindle's real breakthrough springs from a feature that its predecessors never offered: wireless connectivity, via a system called Whispernet. (It's based on the EVDO broadband service offered by cell-phone carriers, allowing it to work anywhere, not just Wi-Fi hotspots.) As a result, says Bezos, "This isn't a device, it's a service."'

'"The vision is that you should be able to get any book—not just any book in print, but any book that's ever been in print—on this device in less than a minute," says Bezos.'

This will allow readers to theoretically buy any book on Amazon, anywhere, whenever they want. And it's important to emphasize that Mr. Bezos isn't talking about renting books — taking a cue from the successful iTunes sales model, they'll be selling to own. The lingering unknown is in what kind of format these books will be provided. Will there be DRM? Will you also be able to read these books on your computer? How many devices will you be able to share them with? We'll find out this week when Kindle comes out, but if the Amazon MP3 store is representative of the Amazon digital sales ethos, then we can assume a nonrestrictive, reasonable license associated with each eBook.

On updates:

Another possible change: with connected books, the tether between the author and the book is still active after purchase. Errata can be corrected instantly. Updates, no problem — in fact, instead of buying a book in one discrete transaction, you could subscribe to a book, with the expectation that an author will continually add to it. This would be more suitable for nonfiction than novels, but it's also possible that a novelist might decide to rewrite an ending, or change something in the middle of the story.

Anyone who has ever published a book knows receiving the first copies from the first print-run is a terrifying experience. You are both overjoyed and, quite frankly, channeling some form of schizophrenia — as you're frantically flipping through looking for printing, editorial and design errors, you're also frantically trying to block out your ability to see said errors. It's like the mother of a convicted murderer hugging her child trying not to let the murderer aspect interfere with her love ... Or maybe it's nothing like that.

And finally, two quotes — one from Mr. Levy (the author of the article) and the other from James Patterson:

Levy: 'That fort [of physical books and traditional publishing] will stand, of course, for a very long time. The awesome technology of original books—and our love for them—will keep them vital for many years to come.'

Patterson: "The baby boomers have a love affair with paper ... But the next-gen people, in their 20s and below, do everything on a screen."

I think Patterson's quote provides a tidy summation of what one in the industry can expect: the fort Levy describes has a lifespan only as long as, and probably much, much shorter than the remaining lifespan of baby-boomers.

In closing, my thoughts on Kindle are that I think the infrastructure of the Kindle system (having the books in a digital format, the collaboration with and support of large publishing houses and having a simple, ubiquitous sales system in place) is more exciting than the Kindle physical object. For a large company, Amazon has been surprisingly generous in opening up its databases and systems for the public to build on top of. If the Kindle system was open in such a way that allowed other devices (and I'm looking at you iPhone and iTouch) to patch into it, then I think we're onto something really interesting.

Other Reading:
- The Future of Reading Steven Levy for Newsweek
- Engadget
- Gizmodo

Sumie Kawakami joined us at Wordstock to sign copies of her new book, Goodbye Madame Butterfly.

This was the first time Chin Music had a stand-alone booth at a book fair. Now that we have four titles, it makes sense, and it makes it a lot easier to get into conversations about the vision of the company as well as the stories inside each book.

The weekend was a success, not just because we sold a lot of books, but because Sumie was able to talk to potential readers, and because we were able to finally display the four gorgeous covers by Craig on one table. We were inundated with "how beautiful" all weekend. It was exciting for us to see how those four covers lured people to our booth. Brother Dave, manning our booth at the New Orleans Bookfair, echoed our thoughts. A few of the comments we heard give a sense of the reaction to Craig's work:

"This is exactly what the Internet can't do."

"I don't normally judge a book by its cover, but in this case ..."

"You should charge people to pet these books."

"I'm not even interested in the topic of this book, but I want to buy it just to have on my shelf."

But Jay Gatsby we're not. Our books are both beautiful and worth reading. The conversations Sumie was having with women at the festival were intense and earnest. Not once, I slinked away to go bother Eli Horowitz at the McSweeney's booth, who was just behind the curtain from us, or go talk to the very good folks at Two Dollar Radio.

Let me direct your attention to The Reader, a blog dedicated to reporting on and pondering the evolution of the book. I stumbled upon the site looking for concrete information on whether or not the iPod Touch could read PDFs, thus potentially making it a wonderful eBook reader. I turns out they can (sort of), and The Reader confirms my suspicions that a high-density pixel count will yield happiness for the eyes over long text sessions.

I have spent a couple of thirty minute sessions in Apple stores flicking my way around the web with the iPod Touch. To me, the music and video capabilities are a distant second to the way the high-pixel count screen renders text and web pages. This is where written word is heading, like it or not, and it's quite exciting to see it in action — and what beautiful action it is. Now if I could only afford one.

Some 'official' Goodbye Madame Butterfly book porn over on my portfolio site. Taken on the high-class, high-quality plywood tables in the glowing Friday afternoon light at Co-lab.

The NY Times has a spot-on article about "feature creep," or the death of products we love by the 'need' for constant improvement.

It happens in books too. We're in the final throes of Goodbye Madame Butterfly and last week, when visiting the printers I had to make a conscious decision to hold back on going too wild with all the beautiful paper they have. A couple weeks ago I saw a book (which shall remain nameless) that scared the hell out of me. It had a light red translucent, plastic-like cover with dark red letters printed on it, wrapped over some hardcover boards that were full with four-color printing plus a garish and blinding gold foil stamping. It finished off with full color endpapers and a Tobira made of the same horrid red plastic paper on the cover ... Covered in un-kerned type pulled from what circle of type-hell, I do not know. In a way it made me want to revert to using Helvetica, Franklin and Garamond on everything. Keeping covers devoid of image. And at the most, a discrete ligature as a flourish. All in the name of keeping a book a book — a product where its analog form had achieved feature perfection over a hundred years ago.

This is great. I don't know what the book is about but the cover is a very nice mash-up of real-time data recording, visualization and physicality. Resulting in an "artifact" of a moment (30 seconds) in New York City. The first video on the site (about halfway down the page) goes into details on how it was accomplished.

A brief look in pictures at a decade of evolution of The New York Times's online presence.

1996

2007

Chin Music Press has just won its first award. The cover of Last of the Red Hot Poppas was awarded a HOW International Design Award of merit in the covers category. It's featured in their International Design Annual and will eventually be online.

Let me congratulate Craig, of course, but also two people who helped make this crazy global origami-book-cover project end up so beautiful: Illustrator Leslie Staub and the president of Yushin Printing in Japan, Kohiyama-san, who actually helped fold the poster/cover by hand. Now that's a work ethic!

Briefly, Craig and Leslie coordinated the very exact dimensions of the artwork from CMP HQ in Tokyo and Leslie's studio in Durham, NC. Then Leslie painted Rex and the other characters on a gold-leaf background and a man named Bubba took a photo of the finished art and sent it to Craig. Kohiyama-san then finished the project by having his staff make the first couple of folds by hand on the thousands of posters we printed. A machine did the final folds.

So time to uncork the champagne. Congrats Craig, Leslie and Kohiyama-san. And thanks to Jason Berry for giving us something special to wrap!

Minor edit by Craig: Regarding the folding — actually the final copies were also done by hand. The folding machine used was only able to do two folds. The cover itself required either two folds + an "unfold-pullout" or three folds. So in the end Kohiyama-san and his workers unfolded or refolded every single one of the 4,000 copies. And still got us the completed book from data to a Seattle bound boat in two weeks!

Steve 2: Farrell

Designer / artist behind one of my favorite books in my personal library, Vas: An Opera in Flatland, Stephen manages to blend typography, unconventional layout, photographs and illustrations in ways that shouldn't work but are ultimately tremendously successful (IMO). Strangely devoid of much of an Internet presence, the best I could find on his background is his faculty page at the AI Chicago.

I feel like I must have written about this book before, but if not, here's a smattering of spreads worth checking out. Honestly though, it's an object best experienced in person, in hardcover.

It looks like the hardcover print run has been extinguished and current options for purchase are limited to a suspect paperback reprint or a $498 hardcover leftover from an independent seller. Mine? You'll need more than $500 to pry this guy from my ink stained hands.

Steve 1: Heller
A nice interview with hyper-prolific design writer Steven Heller. Perhaps the most inspiring bit about his life is the sheer amount of productivity he manages to pull off. On what would otherwise be a burden of a schedule to an average Joe:

You’ve managed this freelance career on top of a full time job for 30 years, you’re co-chair of this MFA program, you answer emails lightning-fast and I’m pretty sure you have a life, too...can you divulge for freelance writers some of your Steven Heller time management secrets?

I don’t think it’s a matter of superb time management as much as filling up time. Without getting Freudian or Jungian or Marxian (Groucho that is), I make up for my deficiencies by appearing to be prolific. Everyone works at their own rhythms, which, if we’re lucky, is in sync with our interests and curiosities. You at UnBeige post six items a day — and you probably do a lot of legwork to do that — for some that’s a tremendous amount of work. But it’s your job, and your passion. I simply do what turns me on (and turns off some of the demons and voices raging in my head). I also like being able to tally up accomplishments, and these come in waves. This year my wave is establishing new MFA programs at the School of Visual Arts, like the brand new MFA in Design Criticism (to be chaired by Alice Twemlow) and a few others that are top secret at the moment. Next year, maybe it will be knitting large scarves.

Browsing the web at my real job, I came across the Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA) website. Beyond the fact that I think it's pretty damn cool that there is a society of people who like fonts and they decided to start up a nonprofit, I'm excited they also do fundraising and hold an annual conference called TypeCon in a North American city. Guess where TypeCon is this glorious new year?

During the summer months, my beautiful hometown will be host to type designers, graphic artists with a proclivity for text and letterforms, printers, publishers and book artists from all over the world. So come spend some time this summer in the Pacific Northwest, hang those quotes, drop Chin Music Press a line and kern baby, kern.

TypeCon2007
August 1-5, 2007
Crowne Plaza downtown
Seattle, Washington
S {o} T A

Just bumped into this brilliant little site on book covers. Why hadn't I seen this before?

Ben Pieratt from fwis posts mini-reviews of covers new and old. Ingeniously simple integration with blog software allows for quick searching and commenting by users.

They even do interviews with designers like Jon Gray.

And while sifting through comments I ran into a link to Mark Melnick's site, which features some beautiful cover design work.

So go and get inspired!

Back from a 10 day jaunt to Hanoi. Beautiful city. Lots of coffee drinking and book reading ensued. One incredibly delicious hamburger was consumed. Pho? 10 bowls or so.

Finally sifted through 600 articles from a variety of feeds. Here's a few of the more interesting bits I bumped into:

Beautiful NYTimes infographic summarizing a very complicated series of Middle East relationships in a single image.

Design Observer has some words on the great Pentagram co-founder and brilliant designer Alan Fletcher, who recently passed away.

DO also announces the results of their Winterhouse Awards for Design Writing: congratulations to Thomas de Monchaux and Katherine Feo.

Khoi Vinh interviews the articulate and talented artist Louise Ma. Part of his ongoing series of monthly archive illustrations.

Sydney has commissioned a photography project much in lines with the work of Ken Kitano in an attempt to "provide a representative male and female “look” for the 160,000 residents of Sydney’s City of Villages." Two things are a bit unsettling about this: 1) no mention or credit is given to the photographer. And 2) it would have been nice of them to reference some prior art in the project.

A couple of days ago, we sent out the August CMP newsletter. You can see a copy of it here. If you've been subscribing to our mailing list for a while, you'll have noticed that we made the switch from plain text to HTML.

So why the switch to HTML?

Essentially, if you follow some basic guidelines, I think the usefulness of the markup outweighs any of the negative points. I think the end result is easier to read, cleaner and more functional. For a quick comparison before I break the guidelines down, look at this: HTML Version | Text Version

In summary: using HTML in a newsletter should increase readability and functionality.

CMP Guidelines for HTML Newsletters:

• No images


• No link shrink


• Simple markup


• Follow standards


• Use CSS

Why no images?

Well, one of the nicest things about email is its ability to be indexed. Email is wonderful for parsing, cataloging, searching, etc. If you replace what would have been plain text with images, you remove that function.

If you must have images, then there are at the very least two rules to be followed: 1) don't use them to replace what could be text, and 2) don't imbed them in the newsletter. Keep them on a server and reference them as you would images on a normal webpage ([img src="http://image.jpg"]).

Why not imbed images? Because it's poor etiquette — it slows down servers, slows down mail clients and fattens inboxes. Keeping the images on servers means that the burden of the image is placed on the server and not the client. It also means that if the image is removed from the server, it can no longer appear in the newsletter. But even so, as long as critical text is still provided as plain text, then the meaning of the newsletter is retained.

Link shrink
Services like Tiny URL are ostensibly nice when you're sending URLs in plain text (and thereby aren't able to mark them up into links) but, to be honest, I've always felt them to be sneaky. I like to know what I'm clicking on, and I have a feeling a lot of other people out there do too. Since we're using HTML now, there' s no reason to shrink links into small URLs. Keep the original URLs so that even the most paranoid of recipients can, at the very least, right click-copy, and paste the URL into their browser to make sure it's a spam-free link.

As far as simple markup, standards and CSS, this is all to ensure that the newsletter appears as intended on the host machines. Indeed when marking up a newsletter, we should be formatting with a clear purpose in mind: readability and functionality.

One note on the CSS: make sure you use inline CSS. Don't link to an external stylesheet or include styles in the header — this won't work on all mail services. Of my limited testing between Apple's Mail, gmail and another generic web-based mail reader, the only version of the newsletter which looked identical on all three was the inline CSS one. Unfortunately this clutters the markup. But since these newsletters are fairly simple to begin with, I think the universal compatibility is well worth the slight messiness behind the scenes. (View the source on the HTML version to see what I'm talking about.)

Let the newsletter structure dictate the markup. For the CMP newsletter, we broke it down into five sections. From top to bottom: The main headers, contents, body, unsubscribe instructions and links to our projects. Chances are, we'll never need more than this. If you return to the comparison link above, I think you'll find that the non-obtrusive integration of the links into the body of the HTML version is far more functional than embedding links alongside text in parentheses.

So if you're sending HTML newsletters already, maybe it's time to double check and make sure you're keeping it clean, functional and to the point. And if you're doing it hardcode ASCII style, maybe it's time to reconsider HTML.

For all those interested in a transparent look at the process of creating a beautifully printed book containing both graphics and text, let me direct your attention to this thread over at the Tufte forums. Edward Tufte graciously illuminates the otherwise opaque process by posting images of full signatures and discussing in detail some of the problems that come up regarding folding, images and spillage.

Just a quick note to inform people of the "Winterhouse Writing Awards for Design Writing & Criticism." In their words:

The Winterhouse Writing Awards seek to increase the understanding and appreciation of design, both within the profession and throughout American life. A program of AIGA, these annual awards have been funded by William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand of the Winterhouse Institute to recognize excellence in design writing and to encourage the development of new voices in design writing, commentary and criticism.

A worthy cause, indeed. And we're going to need some fresh blood to take over for Steven Heller eventually — or at least get him some vacation time!

Update: Also, I just noticed the beautiful new(ish?) site Winterhouse completed for The Poetry Foundation.

Amazon's getting all geeky -- flexin' their data mining muscles and providing us with all sorts of useless (?) statistics.

For instance:

With Kuhaku you get 2.607 words per dollar or 3,851 words per ounce. This is out of a total of 265,483 characters or 46,825 words. She averages 19.1 words per sentence and only contains 10% complex words (non-native speakers rejoice!).

Some of the most common words in Kuhaku include husband, time, Japanese, day and Mike. (Mike?)

And perhaps the most fun statistic of all, "Statistically Improbable Phrases," of which, Kuhaku contains: pet pensions, rajio taiso, bilingual dog, canned coffee, feeling iii and father hunters.

Amazon is, by the way, selling Kuhaku for $17.96, which is almost cheaper than we get them for. So if you've yet to grab this easy read on pet pensions, rajio taiso and father hunters, now's never been better.

There's a good interview over at the AIGA between Stephen Heller and Charles Hively on illustration in contemporary design. Hively is the man behind 3x3, "the first magazine devoted entirely to the art of contemporary illustration."

On illustration in design curricula:

Students are encouraged to search for stock images and to never consider using art-original or even stock art. Professors don’t introduce design or ad design classes to illustration, only illustration classes talk about illustration. I know when I introduce my graphic design students at Parsons to illustration, the light goes off.

Is this really the case? I've been out of school for a while now, and even when I was there, my focus was on photography, not design. Is it that illustration has been pushed out of design curriculums or that design curriculums have simply become more commercial? My gut says the latter, and looking at the boorish monotony of mainstream advertising coupled with the commercialization of the University System, the only explanation seems to be that there's a certain expectation from students to be taught a Trade rather than an Art. If your goal is to pay off the $100k a BFA costs nowadays, then succumbing to commercialism and corporate expectations for The Photograph is probably the only way you're going to hit a zero balance on the credit card. Which is unfortunate. I know this can't be the case everywhere — there are surely wonderful design programs exposing students to a breadth of media, but if what Hively is saying is true, then those must be in the minority.

I half agree with Hively on the following: "When everyone else is doing photography, do something other than photography." I know what he's getting at but I gawk at production ethos prescribing something because it's *not* something else. Photography and Illustration both fall under fine arts and should be used as appropriate on a per-project basis. That said, there is definitely an unbalanced predilection towards photography in recent design (book jackets, anyone?!), and Hively's beautiful work in putting together 3x3 is most definitely an attempt to shake up those brain-dead art directors stuck in photo tunnel vision.

Some of the most interesting design pieces I've seen of late (and especially at the ADC) have been almost wholly illustration based. And it's probably more than apparent to followers of our work that we have a very strong bias towards illustration in connection with literature. There's something about printed matter and the lusty flavor in the lines of hand-drawn illustrations that really connect on a gut level for me. I couldn't imagine having had a photograph of Shinjuku on the cover of Kuhaku, nor could I have imagined having NASA Hubble shots of stars for Do You Know.

Kudos to Hively and Heller for sparking some conversation on this subject.

Here's a couple links to some "illustrators" doing beautiful things:
Brian Cronin
Richard May (+ an interview with Apple)
Yoshitake Shintsuke

Fortune has a decent article on the history of the cubicle. However, they have a much more fascinating sidebar on how people work. It's nice to read how many of these super-busy types inject a healthy dose of exercise into their routines. Some of these people having had the same routine for 25+ years.

Bill Gross, CIO from Pimco injects his take on yoga:

The most important part of my day isn't on the trading floor. Every day at 8:30 A.M., I get up from my desk and walk to a health club across the street. I do yoga and work out for probably an hour and a half, between 8:30 and 10. There's only been two or three times in the past 30 years when someone has come across the street and told me I should get back to the office. One of them was the 1987 market crash.

I'm always fascinated by routines and getting peeks into the lives of highly efficient people. Having just moved into an office space, my hitherto uninterrupted routine of working from home has been shaken up, and I'm looking for ways to make sure I don't skimp on gym visits.

At the very least, as soon as this nasty Tokyo weather of late clears up, I'll be getting at least an hour of biking in a day.

Day two of the judging was much like day one but without all of the fat. The entries were lean and for the most part interesting.

The day was split into two sessions — rounds two and three. Round two was where we attempted to separate the excellent from the junk that slipped in. I have to admit I was a bit surprised by how much crap had made it into the second round. And I was also a bit saddened by how some of the pieces I really enjoyed didn't make it. At the end of judging, we found that there were quite a few pieces that didn't make it even though some judges felt passionate about them.

The third round, which began after lunch, was perhaps the most important and illuminating of all the rounds. Discussions were encouraged and, since there weren't nearly as many pieces as in rounds one or two, we could spend more time meditating on the connection between the design and content of a piece. This is more like what I expected the whole show to be closer to in terms of interaction between the entries and ourselves.

In round three some judges rallied for pieces they really loved — often my vote was influenced by an illuminating explanation. Other times many of us, because of lack of description of the piece or lack of time to fully investigate, missed the entire point of a piece. Thankfully we had the chance to go back and re-evaluate in most of those instances. But it did make you think about how many of the earlier rounds' great pieces missed out because of poor documentation or a lack of an immediately obvious point. But when you are dealing with 4,000 entries that you have to personally sift through, these instances of falling through the cracks are inevitable.

Perhaps the most enlightening discussion happened at the end of the day when we were left with a dilemma: the entries to the corporate branding category that had made it to the third round were horrible. I postulate that the entire category had a poor showing and that the psychology of judging things is such that you think *something* should advance, even if that something is only strong in relation to really weak pieces. As such, we had five logos which, had any won an award, would have caused Paul Rand to come back from his grave and slap us.

Okay, so I have about three minutes to write this entry.

Yesterday was the first day of judging for the Art Directors Club (ADC). It was amazing and exhausting. There were over 12,000 entries for the entire competition. Yes, 12,000.

The basic format was to split all the judges into groups of five. This was nice because you got to spend all day with four other people and really get to know them. You then rotated between four different stations if you were in the print design category: Broadcast, Print 1, Print 2 and Digital — Digital being digital images and/or movies of interior/architectural design and typography.

We worked like maniacs spending almost the entire day — 9 am to 6:30 pm — doing nothing but looking at entries. For the broadcast and digital categories, the group of five sat in front of a projector or TV and watched the entries and ranked each one "in" or "out" on a small clipboard. For the print —poster, book, branding, etc. — we walked around with miniature Post-its and stickered the backs of the entries we liked. The assistants to the judges then tallied which entries made it to round two, which is today.

Random note about Japan: Wow, the Japanese have a huge presence in this year's show, mainly in print (almost nothing in broadcast or space-design). There were some posters I was really pushing for that I hope made it through to the next round. Generally speaking, beautiful printing and well executed design.

Okay okay, I'm going to be late. More later.

update: Notes from Day 2

Craig wrote this last Saturday. he's on his way to New York right now. — Cletus

And so the hectic month of February begins. A traveller from America arrived at my doorstep just moments ago. Sunday we're off to way below-freezing Sapporo to indulge in hot-springs, crab and hot sake. And then on Wednesday I'm off to NYC as a judge for the 85th Annual Art Directors Club Awards. From there it's New Orleans with the CMP gang, but I'll leave that for another post.

I was invited a little over three weeks ago — pretty short notice, I thought — to come out to NYC and judge the print category for the ADC awards. Humbled, but really, really busy, I actually thought about declining. After some schedule-clearing phone calls, I decided to accept, and I think in retrospect it would have been ridiculous to decline.

So, to say the least, I'm excited at the prospect of leaving my rather insulated world of art and design here in Tokyo and branching out. I'm also looking forward to going through all of the submitted entries and getting a good feel for the what's happening in design right now. Maybe take home some good book ideas.

I should have Net access in my hotel room, so I'll be posting updates from the front lines of judging. Or at the very least, depending on my schedule and jet lag, I'll post a good wrapup of how the event went after it's all finished.

I'm proud to announce that our very own art director, Craig Mod, has been selected as a judge in this year's Art Directors Club awards.

Craig is responsible for the look and feel of everything we make. The ADC made a great choice — it seems Chin Music's secret weapon is not so secret anymore.

Postscript: Craig informs me that he is technically on the jury of the ADC awards and not a "judge." So probably no gavel ... but still a big honor.

Jessica Helfand of Design Observer remarks on hand-drawn type. How in certain instances the air of its awkward inelegance can imbue something with much more character and genuineness than computer typeset reissues. Important meditations in a time when it's so easy to do it on the electric box.

It struck me that in the misguided spirit of (technological) improvement that seems to characterize just about everything, Al had gotten himself and his dead deer to a computer, going from Taxidermy Gothic to Times Roman Bold in one huge, sad sweep. And it's remained with me, this tale of lost typographic innocence: did someone come along and allege that Al's handwriting wasn't up to snuff? I noticed a different phone number: did he sell the business? And why did he retire the rarified four-headed logo from active duty? Maybe he sold it to pay for the deli-slicer.

Khoi Vinh provides an astute user-end account of thumbing through the DVD collection of the past 80 years of The New Yorker.

Due to copyright issues, many usability and otherwise outright obvious features have been removed from the digital archive — things like full-featured searching, copy and paste, and ascii (text) versions of the documents. Apparently, according to this Wall Street Journal article, The New Yorker had little legal wiggle room in how it could have delivered the goods:

When Congress revamped copyright law in 1976, it said magazine publishers retained the right to print collections and revisions of past issues. But when a magazine wants to republish a freelance work in a new and different format, the freelancer must be compensated accordingly, two more-recent court rulings have found. That means when republishing articles on DVD or other digital formats, magazines must pay freelancers again, get their permission to republish free — or preserve the original print context. The New Yorker's solution was to scan the original magazine pages onto DVDs.

These are like the issues Google Books (Print) and similar services have faced during the past year. Here's hoping that we'll see a well-balanced solution — good for both those perusing the archives and those who have provided the content for the archives — in the near future.

Love him or hate him, you can't deny his prolific presence in information design. Anyone who's a fan of thoughtful, insightful graphics knows of Edward Tufte. His first three books — books I'm sure I've mentioned here countless times — have become so standard that saying one should own them has become cliche. Everybody from the 16-year-old web designer down the road to the 60-year-old book designer in the woods has them.

Nine years in the making, his highly anticipated Beautiful Evidence is just about done.

While not popping out until April, us poor folk can start pinching pennies to save up for it. It must be nice to know you can probably push out a 10,000-copy print run and sell out almost immediately!

I think one of the most interesting ways to bring a depth to one's work as a creator is to write about methodologies. A lot of creative people, for whatever reasons, revel in hiding behind a veil of mystery. As if that mysterious nature brings some greater meaning to a work. On the contrary, I find I'm almost always more engaged by a piece when I know the background story behind it -- what was going on in the creator's life at the time, the thought process behind the piece's conception, anecdotes during creation, methodologies used to produce it, etc.

Writers receive an undue amount of scrutiny into their personal lives -- writing perhaps being one of the most universally acknowledged "mysterious" modes of self expression. There's something painfully romantic about the life of a writer, novelists in particular. And to those who don't find it romantic, there is almost always at the very least a sense of awe and respect. In a recent Daily Show interview with John Irving, he revealed he lost his virginity to a much, much older woman when he was in his early teens. Perhaps this is common knowledge among his fans, but it was the first time I had heard of it. It certainly caused me to pause and think back on some of the sex scenes from his novels I had read. It's also an entertaining and shockingly personal thing to hear in a TV interview, which in and of itself further says something about John (that he's good at self promotion perhaps?).

As for artists who are revealing bits and pieces on a deeper, more captivating level, let me direct your attention to Eric Van Hove, an artist based out of Tokyo whose work thrives almost entirely on back story and concept. I'm not really sure I understand much of Eric's work, but his writing and details make the adventure of traversing his work rewarding in and of itself.

On a different note, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, a photographer whose work I just ran into today, offers an incredibly deep site with enough back-story and methodology to keep you busy for hours.

The fascinatingly hyper-complex formatting guidelines for movie scripts, based on the Warner Bros. style.

Buzztracker had just gone live 12 hours earlier when, suddenly, there were literally dozens of people a second visiting the site. Last week, thanks to a nod from Slashdot, which is akin to getting a New York Times front-page article in terms of readership, I woke up on Tuesday morning to a torrent of traffic. Looking at the logs, I immediately noticed one striking discrepancy � despite having a contact form available on the about page, nobody was sending feedback; the hordes had locked lips. Well, that's not entirely true. Three people out of about 40,000 had sent feedback. I sat there in my underwear thinking it seemed odd that no one had anything to say.

(Note to self: when writing a blog entry exhausted after almost 2 days of wakefulness, stay away from dreams! (click below the fold to read the original dream post.))

She whispers something to me but I can't quite make it out. What? Tissues? Yes, I have some tissues. No, she mouths, earthquake. Tissue. Jishin. Tissue. Jishin. I juggle the Japanese back and forth. Then, despite being far above the neon the air begins to tremble and my eyes bolt open.

"Jishin. Jishinn," she says, her eyes too are wide open, but not yet awake. They're somewhere else, desperately trying to get here. I brace myself in my bed. The shaking lasts only a few seconds. Maybe longer but still, it feels like only a moment. Disappointed, as I always feel after such a small tremor, I drift back asleep.

---

A few hours later I wake up and roll over to my computer. A page only a handful of people know about comes up with a big red dot over Tokyo. An earthquake hit at 7:22 AM. For a moment I'm filled with the feeling you get when things mesh together perfectly. And as soon as that moment fades I realize it's time to finally publicly release this thing (although, something tells me the tens of thousands of people viewing it over the last couple of days already makes it public).

So here, allow me to expel these old paranoia demons of creativity breathing down my neck. Something which would have been impossible without the help of Chin Music Press' (Brucer!) unwavering support. Chin Music Press' second project:

http://www.buzztracker.org

Here's a cover gallery for the CIA World Fact Book dating back to 1985.

I'd like to take a moment to point out the homepage for Cast of Shadows, a debut novel by Kevin Guilfoile. So far it's been getting great reviews and I'm tempted to stop by Kinokuniya in Shinjuku and see if they have a copy. But what I'm most impressed by is the nice, personal, clean homepage they've built for it. The design firm Coudal has been engaging in various viral marketing activities (such as designing their teaser site for the first 10 pages of the book) to generate buzz for CoS for a few months now. This is a fine example of adding worth/interest/cheap marketing for a new book. The only thing I wish they'd add to the site is some more concrete biographic information on Mr. Guilfoile. It sounds (from bits of the reviews) like he's written some other stuff for McSweeney's that I'm sure people would enjoy checking out.

The novel is available on Amazon.

UPDATE: More of Kevin's work can be found here: http://www.guilfoile.net/kevin.php.

UPDATE 2: fixed the spelling of poor Kevin's name.

We made a rookie mistake that is delaying our official launch in North America: We put the wrong barcode on our bellyband. When Michael Cashin of Consortium called me to tell me this, it was like getting hit in the solar plexus. The rest of the day, I was in a deep, deep funk.

But then some good things happened, and we turned this problem into an opportunity. First of all, designer Bob Garlick in Vancouver offered to make our EAN Bookland barcode for a case of beer. Then he helped us find a printer in Seattle that would do the job without draining our triple-digit bank account.

Our current bellyband (the wrapper around the base of the book) has a blurb from us describing Kuhaku. That's because we didn't go out and get reviews and blurbs while the book was printing like normal publishers. We decided to publish the book first, then show it around to distributors, reviewers, etc. That's largely been a good strategy for us because people take us seriously when they see the book.

But now, with this barcode mistake, we had a chance to do two things: create a super-cheap throwaway bellyband like we envisioned in the beginning but could not quite convey to our printers in Iceland (thus the high-quality off-white paper used for our current bellyband); and include some blurbs from reviews.

This led to a discussion at CMP HQ about the cover. It's a beautiful cover, we believe. But the one thing it doesn't convey is Kuhaku's humor. Cletus in the U (who incidentally is being reprimanded for his rogue blog-post the other day) hints at the book's touches of whimsy, but nowhere is it apparent that inside there are many moments of silliness. Now, with these blurbs on the new bellyband, we think the astute reader will pick up on the humor within:

AIGA has just put online the past four years of their design competition archives. Of note is the book design category with over 350 entries to browse through. Also of note is that this is one of the better uses of Flash I've seen in a long time. Although, as is the case with Flash, I can only direct you to the main pages. Enjoy.

From Glenngary, Glenn Ross:

A-B-C. A-always, B-be, C-closing. Always be closing! Always be closing!! A-I-D-A. Attention, interest, decision, action. Attention -- do I have your attention? Interest -- are you interested? I know you are because it's fuck or walk. You close or you hit the bricks! Decision -- have you made your decision for Christ?!! And action. A-I-D-A; get out there!! You got the prospects comin' in; you think they came in to get out of the rain? Guy doesn't walk on the lot unless he wants to buy. Sitting out there waiting to give you their money! Are you gonna take it? Are you man enough to take it?

We aren't selling real estate, but I have a feeling if we had Blake on our side, we'd have sold out of 10 runs of Kuhaku by summer and have bookstores cowering at our whim.

Kuhaku isn't a house or a piece of land. But it is a book, an actual product. And as such, it needs to be sold or else CMP starts and ends at Kuhaku. And we have way too many ideas for new books to go through before we give up just yet.

These past few months we've done a soft launch in Japan, and people seem to be really digging the book. Now it's time to push into the American market in a big way. We have distribution (see: A crash course at Consortium) and a sales team of about 40 people on our side, poised to push Kuhaku into shops around North America. I had until December 23rd to make a sales kit for this team. We wanted the kits to be visually interesting and reflective of our attention to detail. But we also needed them to be really cheap. So I set off to Tokyu Hands and, after a few hours of poking around with materials, had developed an idea of what they should be like.

COST
We were able to produce 50 kits for a grand total of (about) $45.00.

McSweeney's is like a bullet train. A bullet train full of dynamite aimed at a cliff.

How We Are Hungry is another great read from Eggers and yet another McSweeney's book beautiful in its simplicity (in both writing and design). I picked up the hardcover edition for Christmas for myself and plowed through it on the plane ride back to Tokyo.

It's a coal-black hardcover. No color anywhere on the case -- just an embossed flying dragon (apparently, a "gryphon") on the front; his name, the title and the McSweeney's chair on the spine; "McSWEENEY'S" on the back. But you can't really see any of this unless you tilt it just so in the light. The endpapers are thick and textured. They have a subtle design that also moves in the light and reminds me of how someone from the 1970s might perceive wood grain. That is to say, slightly psychedelically.

Take a spin through all of the Time "Man (Person) of the Year" covers, starting from 1927: Time Online.

And for more fun, Czech Book Covers from the 20s and 30s here. (Why is that man holding a red circle?)

(Links humbly taken from crazy Coudal and co.)