At 66, Japan's Graphic-Design Magazine *IDEA* Comes to Shanghai — Still Avant-Garde, Still Instructive

One idea from the conversation: Japanese society keeps closing in on itself. Young people won't go abroad, to study or to work, and are content where they are. They think they are the different ones — a dangerous thought.

On March 9, a small exhibition built around the veteran Japanese graphic-design magazine IDEA (アイデア) opened inside Banana Fish Bookstore on Shiquan Road in Shanghai's Putuo District. For the half century before the internet arrived, a generation of Asian graphic designers treated the magazine as scripture. There were few other ways to see what design looked like elsewhere.

IDEA was founded in 1953, a bilingual quarterly devoted to graphic design and typography. Through it, the more adventurous visual languages of other countries reached Japan and fed a design scene that was then on the rise. Four things have marked the magazine from its founding to today: inventive design, superb paper and printing, exacting type and typesetting, and subjects worked through in depth.

In the small glass gallery, 45 issues of IDEA, picked by different graphic designers, run from 1960 to 2018. Each issue takes one theme; some were tracked down in Japanese secondhand bookshops, others bought by the designers back in their student years. The covers vary wildly in color, the pages are thick, and even the earliest issue still looks avant-garde now.

"IDEA is another kind of magazine. It doesn't live on advertising; it lives on sales. Over the past decade a great many Japanese magazines have disappeared," former editor-in-chief Kiyonori Muroga said in an interview. He is one of the magazine's central figures, and led IDEA for 19 years, from the end of the 1990s into the new millennium.

Some rare early special issues are on show, among them IDEA No. 44, from 1960, with a cover by the Japanese graphic designer Ikko Tanaka. That issue marked nearly ten years since the founding of the Japan Advertising Artists Club, the design body that has shaped Japan more deeply than any other. Set up in 1951, it began calling for open public submissions in 1953, which brought a great deal of design talent into view. The 1964 Tokyo Olympics then carried the club's graphic design onto the international stage. Then came the global wave of student revolt in 1968; in the campus turmoil that followed, the club was forced to dissolve in 1970.

Even so, from the end of the 1964 Olympics onward, gifted and boldly experimental Japanese graphic designers kept appearing. They took in international visual elements by the armful and fused them with local tradition. Ikko Tanaka, who designed cover posters for IDEA in its early years, was one of them.

"His work is modern and deeply Japanese, a singular blend of Japanese calligraphy and Western typography that set him apart from his contemporaries," the poster artist Paul Davis said of him. Tanaka, active from the late 1950s, was known for modernist plainness; he used strong blocks of geometry as bold images to speak with, and his work is saturated in a Japanese sensibility. Painted faces and calligraphic brushstrokes turn up again and again in his posters — "strong, clean, colorful, playful, precise."

In the 1980s Tanaka, working as a graphic designer, built the minimalist concept for Muji's first Tokyo store, covering clothing, furniture and food. Ten years later, in 1991, the first Muji store outside Japan opened in London — "a place for minimalists: they like wastebaskets of corrugated cardboard, shirts of cotton, plain but well made, with no extra trim and no company logo," the New York Times wrote that year.

Another issue on show, IDEA No. 46, has a cover by Hiroshi Ohchi, the magazine's first art director and the man responsible for how it looked; he designed many of its covers. This one is among his best known: translucent colored pebbles scattered at random across the page. On the cover of IDEA No. 45, Ohchi ran thick stripes in three colors straight through the image, setting up an oscillation in the middle — plain and playful at once. That issue came out in January 1961.

Recent issues are on show too. Issue 380, from 2018, Recent Works by Tadanori Yokoo Since 2010, is a long piece on Yokoo with an interview; Issue 376, from 2017, Graphic Designers and Exhibitions, looks at where graphic designers stand now and how their work relates to curating; Issue 323, from 2007, is devoted to Wim Crouwel, the Dutch graphic designer and typographer who co-founded the studio Total Design in 1963 and designed the Dutch pavilion at the 1970 Osaka Expo.

But the readership has changed. Tetsuya Goto, an Osaka-based curator and graphic designer, told QDaily: "Compared with the generation before the internet, young Japanese today don't care about foreign design. If an issue is about designers from abroad, sales are certain to drop."

IDEA calls itself a pure graphic-design magazine that does not live mainly on advertising, and its troubles do not stop at the decline of publishing. The visual language of younger designers has changed; so have the channels information travels through and the way people read; the internet set off a flood of it; even shifts in business models have knocked against the way graphic designers work. All of it hits hard.

On how the design business has changed, Muroga said in one interview that IDEA has of course thought about digital editions, but that would cost the craft and technique that live in printing, so nothing concrete has been done yet. He admits the decline of bookstores cannot be stopped.

Muroga thinks magazines have to reach further into the parts of life nobody has noticed yet. "Sales used to be the important measure of whether a magazine was any good. But content is getting more niche, the fields finer and more numerous, which means a lot of interesting material has never been dug out by the magazine business. Only a magazine made that way can be interesting."

The other half of the exhibition is "Yellow Page," which ran as a column in IDEA from Issue 365 to Issue 373, written by Tetsuya Goto.

It began precisely because Goto "felt the younger generation in Japan had stopped caring about design outside the country," and because he knew so little about how graphic designers elsewhere in Asia were working. In 2011, as guest editor of Typographics ti:, the journal of the Japan Typography Association, he traveled to seven Asian cities — Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei, Shenzhen, Bangkok and Beijing — and interviewed graphic designers who had started out in the mid-1990s, among them the Beijing designer Xiao Mage, the Taipei designer Aaron Nieh and the Hong Kong designer Javin Mo.

The point of the trip was to see how graphic designers there were getting on, and to talk about their daily lives, where they found ideas, and to collect their work. The seven interviews, each written in the designer's own voice, then ran in IDEA over two years under the name "Yellow Page," borrowed from the Yellow Pages directory. Goto also mounted several exhibitions in Osaka and Kyoto, showing the Japanese public the Asian designers' work, the small objects of their daily lives, and their writing.

On that trip through Asia, the Hong Kong designer Javin Mo went along as Goto's interpreter and project partner. He founded the Hong Kong studio Milkxhake, and he curated this Shanghai show, IDEA: Yellow Page. The magazine has now published the "Yellow Page" material.

We also talked with Goto and Mo about the trip, about where Japanese graphic design stands, and about what the internet has done to a generation of young designers.

Q = QDaily

Q: In the "Yellow Page" series in IDEA, the seven designers' accounts of themselves are very detailed, almost like stories. What did you actually ask them?

It was different from talking to them straight about the state of the local design industry. We were more interested in "as a graphic designer, how do you live and work?" — what time do you get up, where do you work, what time do you stop, what music do you like, what does your workspace look like; or where are you from, what have you done, how did you come to design.

It is a big picture and a very fine-grained one at the same time. We were trying to show what a graphic designer's life really is: the ideas and the work. The first aim, of course, was to let Japanese readers see what their counterparts elsewhere in Asia were doing, because Japan is an island country with relatively few ties to other places. And Japanese society now keeps closing in on itself. Young people won't go abroad, to study or to work, and are content where they are. They think they are the different ones — a dangerous thought.

Q: The designers come from different countries and regions, so from different cultures. Which things about design caught your attention most?

Compared with the mainland, publishers of books and printers in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore have a different relationship. What surprised us, for instance, is that Artron in Beijing, a very large printer of art books, will take on tiny print runs for independent publications. In Hong Kong or Taiwan that work is done by small outfits; there is no room for it at that scale. We found that interesting.

For graphic designers across Asia, though, the circumstances are remarkably alike — the way they live, their rhythm, their style. Xiao Mage in Beijing may be a bit different, since he works for a publishing house while most of the others freelance. Otherwise everyone's life is basically the same thing, down to the music they listen to. Some of that is globalization: the internet ties everyone together, design included. We are moving into "global styles."

Q: "Yellow Page" mentions that the Seoul designers Sulki & Min used posters in a Kyoto workshop to get design students thinking. In Japan, as a professor of art and design, how do you teach students now? What have you noticed?

I am still looking for better ways to get students thinking. Posters are one way, postcards another, but they come to the same thing. The other thing is that I only know Japanese students, so they are all I can talk about — and the younger generation in Japan is growing more passive. When I was a student and the professor set us a design problem, we were usually curious; we asked a lot of questions, some of them naive, and out of that we came up with ideas, or knocked them down. That quality matters enormously in a designer.

But Japanese students no longer push back. They wait to be told what to do next, as if the teacher were feeding them knowledge; or they hunt for the answer — when there is no answer. Design is a way of thinking, and they believe there is a correct solution. I think this has to do with always being able to find an "answer" on the internet; people go online looking for one. The internet is shaping the next generation of Japanese design.

Q: You have both worked as editors choosing what a graphic-design magazine covers — Typographics ti: and Design 360. In today's design climate, how do you decide what goes in an issue? Do you think about sales?

Honestly, we don't think about sales, though maybe only because we are not the ones who own the magazine. If sales are good, everyone is happy, naturally. For a graphic-design magazine the main goal is still the visual, the design itself. Look at old issues of IDEA and you find an enormous amount of visual material, poster after poster, and less text — because back then there was no other way to get the latest information. For a designer the magazine was almost the only source, especially for keeping up with the United States and Europe.

Take an example: if you saw a poster on the cover of IDEA in those days, it was probably by a famous designer. Now the internet is fast enough to put countless images in front of you inside a minute, and nobody needs a paper magazine to relay news from America or Europe. So depth has become enormously important to making a magazine today. That is what IDEA is doing — pushing further into fine typography and paper, which no electronic device can reproduce. The hard part is that typefaces differ; Chinese and Japanese typography are very far apart. How to handle type and layout is what IDEA cares about most right now.

Beyond that, the other thing I care about is what a graphic designer is supposed to be, so that making books and designing posters stop being the limit of what they do. Perhaps we can do something else. Because the visual has always mattered, then and now.

Q: Are there cases that have worked?

Plenty. The Korean designer Na Kim, for instance, designs the magazine Graphic, produces the full visual program for an art museum in Seoul, and holds exhibitions as an artist. This is not to say artists are better than graphic designers. It is that graphic design, visual work, is not only posters and covers; it can be something with a core of its own, even if that is not how people usually see graphic design. More graphic designers now work on their own to build a complete visual scheme for a city museum or an arts institution, sometimes for years, until it becomes an identity you can recognize. It belongs to the museum, and to the designer as well.

Q: In the late 1990s, once the internet arrived, digital, moving and endless visual information began pouring in; today you can stand on the street and see enormous billboards. Does graphic design still have an edge? Is it in decline, or does it matter more?

Any digital image you can see is visual, which means ordinary design still matters, and its core still goes back to graphic design. The concept matters most, and it comes from the original idea — that is the core of graphic design. Put it this way: the idea a poster carries is the point; the poster is only the vehicle, and it can be swapped for any other technology.

So, in short, visual language has only grown stronger. Books have indeed weakened, but visual communication, visual language, is gaining. Perhaps in the future graphic design as a tool will be replaced by vision consultations.

Q: Searching for this magazine online, I noticed something odd: a veteran magazine that is still running has very little written about it on the internet, which seems to prove how far print sits from the web. When you were younger, what impression did it leave on you?

When I was studying in Hong Kong, the school library had a reference collection with a run of IDEA in it, catalogued from the 1970s through the 1980s, so I was always going through them. That was Hong Kong in the mid-1990s.

Then I graduated and joined my first design studio. The boss was one of the designers who were active in Hong Kong in the 1990s, and his generation had been reading it since the 1970s and 1980s; it had shaped them far more deeply. The magazine came at its subjects from unusual angles, and although the editorial staff kept turning over, the reporting went deep. That is a real achievement.

Q: Any comparable Japanese graphic-design magazines you would recommend?

+81, which is more visual; and Illustration Note (イラストノート), good for beginners.

The "Yellow Page" exhibition runs through March 24 at Banana Fish Bookstore in Shanghai.

Images come from the magazine's website; the rest were taken on site.