Dubbed "New Ugly" Because His Work Looks Too "Ugly": What Is the Appeal of Graphic Designer Yui Takada?

"Sloppily distorted typefaces, crude and rough images, and careless layouts make it hard to associate Yui Takada with Japanese design in the conventional sense."

After stirring up controversy in Japan's design world last year, the graphic designer Yui Takada came to Shanghai for a solo show in the spirit of "hearing what other people think" — and offended quite a few people the moment he arrived.

The poster for "Yui Takada: Diving — Graphic Design Exhibition" had a bizarre shape and, worse, used all three primary colors at once, breaking a cardinal rule of color pairing. The sans-serif type carrying the show's information was squashed flat and stretched out, like the layout work of a beginner, while his name — the most important thing on the poster — was set, seemingly without a second thought, in semi-cursive script. It was like fitting a gilded, faux-18th-century chandelier into a Scandinavian IKEA showroom. Strange beyond words.

Takada is 38 this year. In 2006 he founded his own studio, Allright Graphics, and the following year set up the letterpress workshop Allright Painting. Besides designing, he is an associate professor at Tokyo Zokei University, a well-known Japanese art school. Between the teaching post, the fascination with letterpress printing — a craft industry discarded long ago — the not-a-hair-out-of-place slicked-back hair, and the plain clean white T-shirt and black trousers, Takada seems an unlikely candidate for rebellion. Yet his work gives a first impression of breaking every rule, especially to a formally trained graphic designer.

Under the article announcing the exhibition, one comment dismissed the poster: "We've got plenty of designers like this lurking in print shops all over the country." Designers who knew Takada's style better suspected the poster was a clumsy imitation by the curators, not something he had designed himself.

Takada's "reply" was to park an electric scooter in the most conspicuous open spot at the entrance to the show. Its rear mudguard matched the shape of the poster exactly — or rather, the poster came straight from the gaudy, multicolored mudguards you see on electric scooters all over Shanghai, printed with manufacturers' names and phrases like "batteries wholesale."

"I saw them right away, but what really caught my attention was a whole row of electric scooters lined up neatly, covered in fluorescent green, gilt gold and so on. I started wondering how on earth this was printed."

Takada handled the show's entire visual identity himself. Besides the mudguard poster, the red-and-gold-foil opening invitation drew on a small second-hand-buyer ad he found on one of three separate scouting trips through Shanghai's streets — "we buy all kinds of old furniture, rosewood furniture… personal seals, Cultural Revolution items…" — which turned into "Yachao Gallery, 50 Moganshan Road, Shanghai."

The show gathered twelve years of accumulated work and hung it chronologically: from early posters built around printing craft to the unadorned typesetting and the free use of highly saturated color that fill his middle and later output — more than 200 pieces in all.

The venue also had several boxes of Coconut Palm coconut juice for visitors to buy (supplied by the curators) — its packaging was another remarkable piece of design Takada had discovered in Shanghai. "Packaging whose taste you can't picture at all. As a Japanese person, you want to ask: what is this? I remember being scared when I drank it." Vice, invited by the organizers to film Takada's trip to Shanghai, caught him finding the drink he'd never seen before while eating roast duck at Quanjude. "Even with the writing on it, it carried no information for me at all — just a bottle covered in Chinese characters with an incredibly bold color scheme, and that was interesting to me. Normally, if it's peach juice, there'll be a picture of a peach on it, but the coconut juice packaging… has none of what this product is 'supposed to look like.' That a design like this can exist in the market — I find that fascinating."

Like the coconut juice packaging, Takada's work is full of choices that break "design common sense."

"All Latin type, no graphics, and every word set in the same typeface at the same size." The Beijing graphic designer Nod Young still remembers his surprise the first time he saw Takada's poster for FOR STOCKISTS EXHIBITION, a 2010 Tokyo general-goods fair. "Isn't design supposed to separate the headline from the body copy? Takada obviously ignored that rule — and not just ignored it, he deliberately fiddled with the letter spacing and the capitalization too…"

FOR STOCKISTS EXHIBITION has been a client of Allright Graphics since the studio's second year. In the 2011 poster the typeface switched to a handwritten script, but the letter spacing and capitalization stayed just as odd, and text filled the whole sheet. Note that Takada cut that year's poster into a pentagon: it is the shape of Japan's Tōhoku region, and that was the year of the Tōhoku earthquake. By 2014 he had borrowed the illustrator Masahisa Hirayama's signature smiley face and blown it up until it sat more prominently than the exhibition information. This year's poster is simply an ink-blot doodle that means nothing anyone can name.

Zhang Lei, an associate professor at Tongji University's College of Design and Innovation, was invited to write the foreword for the show. He wrote: "Sloppily distorted typefaces, crude and rough images, and careless layouts make it hard to associate Yui Takada with Japanese design in the conventional sense."

The bewilderment that ran through Japan's graphic design world on June 26 of last year was probably much like what Chinese designers felt looking at the mudguard poster.

In June 2017, JAGDA — the Japan Graphic Designers Association, which represents the highest honor in Japanese graphic design — released that year's yearbook cover and exhibition identity. The design was Takada's, and it started an argument on social media the moment it appeared. A layout centered "any old way," childishly cute drawings, and the words "Graphic Design in Japan 2017" drove one association member, a graphic designer ten years Takada's senior, to swear at length in English on Twitter.

The beaming sun on the cover came from Masahisa Hirayama, a Japanese illustrator Takada admires; Hirayama's playful, deliberately crude line drawings have a following among younger people in Japan, and his merchandise turns up in plenty of Tokyo's trend shops. Takada often works with other designers and artists. His early poster for Letterpress Revival used lettering by Kōga Hirano, and the poster for "Swimming," his autumn 2017 solo show in Ginza, used characters designed by Ikki Kobayashi and a face drawn by Hirayama.

The designer who wrote the comment was very worked up. He fired off several tweets in protest — "I really wish they'd change the titles" — and said the design disgraced the JAGDA name.

"The truth is, the organization hasn't been getting much attention from young people lately." That was Takada's thinking when the 2017 JAGDA yearbook cover came to him. "At the time I was much closer to younger designers than to older ones."

JAGDA was founded in 1978 by Yusaku Kamekura, the father of Japanese design. It has about 3,000 members and wide influence across Asia. Takada himself was one of three winners of the 2011 JAGDA New Designer Award, alongside Daigo Daikoku and Masashi Tentaku. The award is open to Japanese designers under 39, but in most years hardly any winner is under 30.

Japanese graphic design now treats a 30-year-old as a newcomer. It was not always like that.

JAGDA's predecessor was the Japan Advertising Artists Club, or Nissenbi, founded in 1951 — Japan's first nationwide design body after the war. By calling for posters from the public every year, Nissenbi became the cradle where a new generation of graphic designers was found. "Students stood at the door of success, winning prizes and making their names in their teens. That could only have happened in the golden age of the poster in the sixties." In a conversation recorded in the book The Nissenbi Era, Ikko Tanaka, the Japanese design master regarded as a national treasure, said: "[Back then] a lot of the designers were very young — Gan Hosoya and Makoto Wada were still teenagers. Who had ever debuted in their teens before that?"

Japan's economy started growing in the sixties, and design, working backstage, had the same fierce energy: clear personality expressed by simple means, and eccentric talents like Tadanori Yokoo. In Ikko Tanaka's words: "The sixties were full of excitement. 'Psychedelic' was hugely popular then, and everyone started printing in fluorescent colors."

By 1980, the year Takada was born, Japanese companies — still on the near side of the bubble's collapse — were putting more and more money into advertising, and professionalized design methods kept spreading. After the bubble burst, the graphic design that shapes everyday scenery turned more rational, mainly by cutting waste and ornament out of the visual elements.

"About Japanese design," Takada said, "there's a feeling of having seen enough of it."

"In the 1980s, when I was still in primary school, the shopping streets and the roads still had plenty of hand-lettered signs made by craftsmen. There was even a dedicated sign shop near my grandmother's house. From the second half of the nineties, digitization kept advancing, and street advertising became more and more like fast food — thrown together in no time at all." As Takada sees it, Shanghai looks to be going through the same period now.

Looking for new visual experiences, Takada began walking around Tokyo with a camera, photographing the signs and ads made by ordinary people with no design training. "Design isn't only about chasing visual beauty. I wanted to show that someone with no design experience at all is still desperately trying to make something and get it across. I think that attitude is beautiful, a beauty tied to no rules or conventions, and it's genuinely stunning. I just wanted to fold that kind of beauty into my own work."

"Take subway stations. There are the temporary notice boards station staff put up because they have to, made purely to 'communicate,' with no thought given to beauty or balance. I suddenly found myself thinking, 'Have I been too hung up on making things neat?' Bit by bit I was drawn to that raw, natural power in graphic design. I wanted to make that kind of design too."

Takada calls this kind of lettering made by ordinary people the city's "natural typos." The visual vitality in them runs against the taste implied by his own training in graphic design.

Takada grew up in a household soaked in design. His father, Shuji Takada, was a fairly senior graphic designer; anyone who has ridden Tokyo's JR lines has seen the route maps he designed. Shuji Takada worked in the advertising department of Shiseido — a company that produced no end of design stars and pushed postwar Japanese commercial design forward — and later taught at Musashino Art University, where Kenya Hara was his most famous student. In his son's memory, he was a man "devoted to organizing information and design ideas."

Growing up beside such a father, the young Takada was a basketball kid who hated school. "I liked drawing back then too, but I had no thoughts at all about becoming a designer." He failed his university entrance exams and had to repeat the year at a night school; only then did he start seriously thinking about design as a direction.

On his father's suggestion, Takada decided to enroll at Kuwasawa Design School — and again failed to get into the full-time program, landing in the night division once more. "We had so many design magazines and books at home; every day I could learn about design from the work of masters like Yusaku Kamekura and Ikko Tanaka… Still, this turned out to be a good thing for my life. The night division was full of all sorts of people, many of them interesting and with stories behind them." Surprisingly few of his classmates planned to join advertising agencies; most were looking for an opening somewhere in a wide range of personal interests.

"My student years, around 2000, were exactly when young people like Kashiwa Sato and Hiroshi Sugiyama were making their mark with digital technology. I caught that at the time, but I still had a strong interest in handcraft. Look at the work of Kohei Sugiura or Hiromu Hara from the 1960s and '70s — to me it still looks fresh and original." Takada has said in an interview that as a student he saw the exhibition "The Nissenbi Era," and that the feeling of "putting the passion and the ideas of making straight onto paper" struck him as incredibly cool.

For the poster for the "JAGDA Tokyo Welcome Party," Takada filled the frame with color — a technique postwar designers used often — and mixed in what he had taken from photographs of snack-shop signboards on the street. He took an arrow that was bound to look crude once enlarged, blew it up as large as it would go, and put it dead center.

Around the time he graduated, Takada interned at Ikko Tanaka's design office and then worked at Manabu Mizuno's. Then came 2006: "I felt I'd already learned a lot at Good Design Company (Manabu Mizuno's studio), and on top of that I still hadn't designed anything together with my father. His health wasn't good — he had collapsed once, out of nowhere — and after he learned he had about five years left, I said to him, 'I want to make design with you.'" "Financially it was very hard, but my father, my sister Mai Hōjō and I worked together at home, with our mother looking after our daily life the whole time, and we spent my father's last years with him — so inside, it wasn't a dark period at all."

The company the three of them founded was Allright Graphics, and you can see that its early work is clean in style and fairly disciplined in how it treats visual elements. "The work of this phase makes heavy use of letterpress printing, but it doesn't chase a retro look, nor does it fall into the commercial cliché of showing off technique. It has a plainspoken personal character, and reveals his own view of this ancient printing craft," Zhang Lei wrote.

In 2007 Takada got hold of a letterpress machine built fifty years earlier. The occasion was his job as art director of Letterpress Revival, a show put on by a printing house that was about to shut down its letterpress operation and wanted to use the moment to show the public the future of the technology. Takada took over the machine the printers had discarded, installed it in his studio and slowly taught himself the craft. "Most people today finish their designs on a computer, where you can basically preview what the result will look like." As he worked the machine, type that unexpectedly narrowed or changed color excited him, and he came to prize that sense of "deviation."

His father died in 2011. That same year, at 31, Takada won the JAGDA New Designer Award — and it was around then that more and more of these "deviations" started showing up in his design.

Takada's Shanghai solo show closed on September 9 after only fifteen days, which has something to do with the fact that his style has little commercial potential in China. But at the start, the two curators, Qin Zheqi and Gong Qijun, both trained in graphic design, thought the hardest part was their worry that many people wouldn't get Takada at all.

That is why they brought in a number of people from the industry to interpret him. Song Xiewei, dean of the School of Design at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, put it this way: "Takada's work rests on a thorough grasp of design's rules and then goes past the ordinary pursuit of a design result. Takada believes he has a higher-level approach. The question is: how is the traditional vocabulary of design criticism supposed to accommodate it?"

"New Ugly" is the label Chinese designers finally settled on. The term has been circulating in Chinese design circles online for several years, and the examples usually cited include the European architecture magazine Pin-Up, whose type aligns on neither side; the London Olympics logo and the New York City typeface by Wolff Olins; and, from the earlier "Old Ugly," the German culture magazine 032c designed by Mike Meiré.

"Ugly," in this context, is a revolt against the institutionalized grid aesthetic of modernist design, and behind that against modern commercial society. "The reporters on the society pages were all on the students' side. I was described as capitalism's male geisha." In 1970 Nissenbi disbanded, and in Yusaku Kamekura's recollection the students who stormed the poster judging hall used exactly the same argument.

Inevitably, Takada's "ugly" design is easy to mistake for another kind of formalism — and some have already boiled it down to "the layout style that's fashionable right now," which looks easy enough to copy: "Set the English in Helvetica 43 Light Extended, all caps, large, a flatter letterform is better; fill the page as much as you can and leave only 3mm of bleed. Set the letter spacing to zero."

But rather than pure rebellion, what Takada does — folding the visual experience of daily life into carefully made graphic posters — shows a way of thinking about freedom and individuality, and behind it what looks like a stance of aesthetic equality.

Takada told one more story about his father. Allright Graphics had just been founded, and by then Shuji Takada, for health reasons, no longer designed himself and only gave opinions. Once, brother and sister were designing a poster on an Okinawa theme for a theater company. Looking at a composition built around Okinawan awamori, their father said, "Put in a US military plane." The remark stayed with Takada, and from it he learned that a designer's job is not only to solve problems but to be able to pose them.

Asked what question his own design is trying to pose, Takada said: "Young people today are showing a tendency to not fit into the social rules adults made. Thirty thousand people kill themselves in Japan every year, and I think it's because there's something unnatural in the way ways of working sit against ways of thinking. You can't put any of that into a picture, but through design I want to tell young people not to force themselves into society — that they can stay themselves."

As he wrote in the introduction to his Ginza show: "Designers have to be like this, students have to be like this, newcomers have to be like this, men and women have to be like this — don't pay attention to people who talk that way. Pay attention to the direction you understand yourself, that makes you happy, that moves you. That's the message I want to get across."

As for what Chinese designers called him, Takada didn't catch it at first: "What is this 'New Agree' you're all talking about?" Once it was translated, it turned out they had been saying New Ugly. Takada thought the mishearing, "New Agree," suited him better: "Either way, I want to get away from the experience and thinking that come with growing up, and always be able to agree with young people's new ideas, tell them 'not bad' and give them a push."

Cover image courtesy of the exhibition organizers