The
covers you did later as art director for SAL
Magazine are really memorable.
SAL Magazine was a free magazine that relied on contributions from artists. Also
great about it was the large size and the fact that it was distributed for
absolutely nothing. I did visuals for the covers, yes, but the chief editor
Jiro Ohashi would also set aside pages inside for me to contribute work each
issue since he said that “what you’re doing
isn’t really design anymore.” I’m pretty sure SAL was also
the first place I showed off NEWLINE in print. Ohashi also edited a
magazine called design plex, but his
original background was in theater, like Norimizu Ameya’s “Tokyo Grand Guignol” and “M.M.M.” I think this gave him a
slightly more level-headed perspective of art and expression than those focused
on trends.
How
exactly did NEWLINE start?
So for example, at +81 I was
always having to keep in mind balancing the various aspects of the artists we
featured like their interviews, portraits, and pieces with our style as a
magazine. This wasn’t entirely unique to +81, of course; all of the design I did
for my employers by necessity had some extraneous elements in it and thus wasn’t pure expression. So I think maybe NEWLINE was my reaction
to this, my antithesis to popular design. The point was to remove all external
influences or trends so I could focus solely on the genuinely interesting
things within the graphics and simply molding the shapes the presented. I think
“study” is the word they use now to describe what I was going for, like
inventing or developing the things I wanted to do on my own. That’s why NEWLINE represents a big turning point for me. The name NEWLINE comes from a comment Taketo Oguchi from SHIFT made when he saw some of my work, and it’s actually a programming term for a control code to insert a line
break in text. And that’s exactly what I felt I needed:
a break from all the other stuff filling my head day-in and day-out to start a
new line.