Tokyo Type Directers Club Award 2004: Technology Dreams
By Nana Kono
Before opening the show at Ginza Graphi Gallery the winners of the 2004 Tokyo Type Director’s Club Prizes spent two days discussing their works, their making processes and their histories. When this competition had started in 1987, it mainly focused on typefaces, but nowadays it treats a wide range of media from type designs, editorial, and book designs to commercial films and even interactive design.
Sagi Haviv from Chermayeff & Geisner, New York, showed an animation called " Logomotion." It was a 90 minutes catalogue of the company which created a lot of very famous trademarks for big enterprises. The neat logo marks moved, vanished, appeared, lengthened, separated and got together to make unique icons accompanied by signature sound effect.
Guang Yu from Beijing exhibited his art books. He made them from his memory of his elementary school days in 1980’s. The texture of textbooks, its low quality of paper, the way of printing, the way of binding, such trivial things influenced the making of these books. He worked with his friends and contemporaries and in their works we can see the sensitive world of Chinese characters from the days of old.
Taku Sato (Tokyo) won the prize for his contribution to a children’s TV program on Japanese language. Sato and Naoto Fukasawa talked about the execution, idea and process of Japanese design. Sato is a hero in the Japanese advertising world and Fukasawa is a pioneer of artistic industrial design in this country. All of their works were of extremely high quality, yet they retained a sense of humor and bemusement.
Amit Pitaru ( http://www.insertsilence.com with J. Peterson) from New York was interviewed by Yugo Nakamura and his words added a new level to the audience’s understanding of his unique career. Though he had been a classical pianist when he was young, his interest digressed to freer mediums of expressive exploration and he chose the computer as a tool for music-making. Though European, Canadian and Korean competitions had invited him to perform, this was the first time that a Japanese conference recognized him as a most capable interactive designer/artist. He quoted John Maeda’s words, "To create something with software that was made by another person, that is just like playing in the maker’s dream."
Tsutomu Mutoh and Hajime Tachibana discussed artistic expression and expansion in the computer age, introducing works of Victor Vasarely, M.C.Escher and Bridget Riley.
Finally, Micheal Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak, who have been working as M/M (Paris) for 12 years, won the first prize for an exhibition called "ICONES, INDICES, SYMBOLES" (Festival International de l’Affiche et des Arts graphiques, Chapelle des Jesuites, Chaumont) that had been shown in an old gothic chapel. Not only were their decorative typefaces on display but their total produce of the exhibition was highly praised by the panel of this competition. They entertained the audience with their light cheerful footwork in visual and space design.
