Mark Cooke’s G-Mixer

Hangin’ With the Crew

Today I went to two art shows in Tokyo. The first was at Diesel Denim Gallery Aoyama which is one of two Diesel stores in the world that has special installation art work. Yes, it’s a store (I bought a watch), but the art installations they support are really cool.

The installation on the second floor was by an American artist named Mark Jenkins. It was really weird but really cool. The picture above is just twisted… I hardly have the words to describe it. Skeleton, no-face woman, weird animal-suit person, eating a boob, and a ninja baby. Yep, covered all of the important bases. It was fun to join in!

The installation in the store part of the space is a really well laid out lighting setup by Ayako Maruta:

After that I went to a show called “Graphic Design in Japan 2008″ at Tokyo Midtown in Roppongi. It was an overview of award winning graphic design in the current year. There was some really cool stuff, my favorite was a specially designed poster made out of puzzle pieces. Here it is:

Be sure to check out the rest of the gallery, there are some other really interesting designs in there.

Ebisu Graffiti

While Tokyo is much cleaner than other big cities I’ve visited throughout the world there is still plenty of street art and graffiti to find if you know where to look for it.

I went out exploring over the weekend for an hour or two in Shibuya-ku (Ebisu, Hiroo, Daikanyama) and found plenty of examples. There was some really cool stuff but sadly plenty of just messy scribble tags as well.

I get some ideas from the really good stuff when it comes to graphic design. Most of the street art is garbage but when you find something that looks really great it can be a moment of inspiration.

Recently I have been getting into graphic design quite a bit as a hobby and interest area of research. Japan has some amazing magazines in all interest areas. Must like the Japanese otaku are famous for being hardcore into videogames, there are otaku (“maniac”) style magazines for many interest areas outside of videogames.

Anyways, there are two in particular I wanted to point out:

IDEA (アイデア)

This is an internationally well known graphic design magazine that I only recently discovered. At my office there are a lot of back issues for reference and I can see why. There are some amazing designs presented across many forms of media with designers from varied backgrounds. Highly recommended. Almost always has translations of articles in English as well.

When profiling designers who are still alive they are often just given free reign to do whatever they want across their assigned pages. This results in some really cool design work.

+81 (Plus Eighty One)

+81 profiles design trends and designers from across the world. Articles are in both English and Japanese. The layout and design of the magazine itself is quite good and it has introduced me to a lot of skilled designers I would have otherwise would not have learned about.