It
sounds like your days were really jam-packed. Did being that busy mean you
couldn’t pick up any other work?
You guessed it (laughs). I was still in my late 20s though, and being on
a tight budget wasn’t really anything to be
embarrassed about back then. It wasn’t like my friends
making music or clothes ever had any money
either, so I was fine with my situation. Eventually some of the folks at GAS BOOK and SHIFT Magazine who had seen my work in +81 reached out to me about doing something together, and that’s when I began working in other types of media concurrently. Or so I
say, but everything I was working with featured the same kind of content, like
digital culture, cutting-edge graphic design, media art, etcetera, so it all
felt in-sync, like part of the same movement.
There’s no denying that you were involved
with pretty much every creative culture magazine out there at the time.
Maybe it seems like some incredible feat, but it was really more like
there wasn’t any else to do it and I just
happened to be there in the right place, right time as an art director. I don’t think there were a lot of individual designers out there capable
of doing everything digitally back then, and the big firms, while certainly
more than up to the task, would’ve cost an arm and a
leg. I guess that’s why I suited everyone’s needs so well.
You
mentioned this earlier that this was all during the dawn of the digital design
era, so in way if feels like graphic design was sub culture in itself.
Yeah, I think you can say that. It was really popping off back then. The
graphic art scene was tightly linked with the techno and electronic music
scenes since we all relied on the same technology, and a lot of graphic
designers had their backgrounds in fashion, magazines, cyberpunk, things like
that, so many of the designs back then were these chaotic mish-mashes of
visuals and elements from different sub cultures.
It
seems like the nature of graphic design in those days was also quite different
than it is now. Is this something you have noticed?
I think in general it’s that things started
to change around the late 2000s to the 2010s, like things started to diverge
from how guys like me and my friends perceived graphic design and put it to
use. We started seeing highly-skilled people arrive on the scene with the
designs that served a proper function in society rising to the forefront
(branding and so on). But lately, like maybe from around 2021, there’s been a kind of revival of avant-garde graphics, almost as if time
is repeating itself. Similar to how things were when I was young, everyone has
this freedom to put their stuff out there as they please, only this time on
YouTube or social media. I feel like I’m seeing signs
of graphic design as a culture and the interesting things that come with that
again.
If we
can go back to something you mentioned earlier, did you gain your editorial
design skills and knowhow by teaching yourself on the job at +81?
Pretty much. Still, had I been at a major publisher, our methods would’ve been much more orthodox, so really all I did back then was pick
up a feel for editorial work. At GAS BOOKwe were making elaborate packages for each volume and so that helped me learn
about that kind of design. But compared to what you see with how, let’s say, cosmetics are packaged, what I made would be quite
amateurish. At the end of the day, though, I think we were making exactly what
everyone wanted to have back then. Akira Natsume, who was editor-in-chief at
GAS at the time, was around the same age as me, so we had some really good times
coming up with content and packages together.