By NICK CURRIE

Back in 2001 I was sitting in a bar in the Ebisu district of Tokyo. The bar was tucked away on the fifth floor of an office building and decorated in a comfortable retro-’70s style. Old graphic design magazines lay around, and in one of them I found an illustrated article about British designers Derek Birdsall and David Pelham. Pelham had designed the covers of Penguin books I’d had as a child, and I realized that his designs had been as important for me as the books themselves. What else did books as different as A Clockwork Orange and Kites have in common? Just their Pelham covers, and the fact that I owned them.

What really struck me about the Japanese article, though, was the fact that they’d printed a photograph of Pelham. Here, thousands of miles from home, the man who’d been such a strong yet invisible influence on my childhood had suddenly become visible. It felt like a conspiracy of silence had been broken. In Japan, this British designer mattered as much as he mattered to me. In Japan, a cropped picture of Britain was available, and Pelham was inside the frame. He’d been recognized, curated, celebrated.

It was more than that, though; just the big, simple idea that form has an author, and that this author has a face. This was the idea that the mean old-fashioned British media had kept hidden from me. Sure, thanks to them I knew the faces of literary authors, the faces of journalists, the faces of pop stars and models, actors and television presenters. But I didn’t know the faces of British designers. To see those I had to come to Japan – the West’s fragmented mirror, its avant-garde, its curator, its voyeur, out there by the Pacific, the sunrise, and the international dateline. Looking through a big stack of copies of IDEA magazine, I remembered that revelation in Ebisu.

To help me write this article, Joerg Koch, the editor of 032c magazine, drove down to my Neukölln flat with a dozen copies of IDEA in a yellow plastic crate marked with the logo of Deutsche Post AG. I rounded out 032c’s collection with eight more copies from my own bookshelves. I didn’t buy them; they belong to my Japanese partner, a graphic design student.

The first thing to say about IDEA is that it’s expensive: Magma in London will let you have a copy for £28.99 ($58 US), at ProQM here in Berlin it’s 45,55 ($62 US). My collection of twenty IDEAs would have a street price of over $1200. Trying to protect them from my black rabbit Baker (who loves to eat paper) I feel like a graphics goblin guarding a valuable hoard of design gold.

I asked readers of my blog Click Opera what they thought about IDEA. Their answers are bound into this article in bold. Think of them as a tactile, informative insert on rough, fuzzy pink paper.

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(Anonymous)

IDEA isn’t much read by real-life designers. Nor is intended to be. It’s for people like yourself (albeit richer ones). Fascinated outsiders looking in.

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Ah, outsiders looking in! Like the Japanese looking in on the West!

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(Anonymous)

I have been collecting IDEA magazine for the past ten years now and have quite a few of the special editions and multiple editions they put out. Although I’m not in the Art/Design world, they give a very good representation of different styles out there and styles that do not generally appear anywhere else … they are worth every bit of money!

This theme of IDEA as a breviary of styles interests me. Even laymen find it fascinating to see how designers arrive at, maintain, adapt, and change their styles. IDEA is very much about “signature specification.” The authorial signature (a matter of lines, letters, shapes, forms, layouts, images, ways of looking and framing, means of communication, visual jokes and games) might come from the top or from the bottom – from a celebrated designer, or from an amateur. There are the festschrift editions of IDEA that celebrate established designers like Wim Crouwel – a Dutch dandy known for his elegant, futuristic letterforms and strict grids – or Kazunari Hattori, the young Japanese designer responsible for the light, jazzy, airy, eccentric look of Here and There and Ryuko Tsushin magazines.

More bottom-up are the subjects covered by my favorite part of IDEA, the column “When Flying Pigs Design.” Here, artist and journalist Kyoichi Tsuzuki – the man responsible for Tokyo: A Certain Style – documents spray art trucks or visits a 94-year-old man who collects girlie pictures in scrapbooks.

If the “Flying Pigs” column reminds us of Alan Lomax or Harry Smith – or folk-collecting artists who follow in their footsteps, like Jeremy Deller – the festschrift editions are Galbraithian. Economist J.K. Galbraith saw capitalism as very much a top-down affair:

“The modern industrial society, or that part of it which is composed of the large corporations, is in all essentials a planned economy,” said Galbraith in his 1966 Reith lecture. “By that I mean that production decisions are taken not in response to consumer demand as expressed in the market. Rather, they are taken by producers. These decisions are reflected in the prices that are set in the market, and in the further steps taken to ensure that people will buy what is produced and sold at those prices. The ultimate influence is authority.”

Where, in that Galbraithian view, would design figure? Would design be a charismatic aura around authority, or a fully integrated part of those producers’ decisions – “the further steps taken to ensure that people will buy,” in Galbraith’s words? It’s a question I ask myself as I scan Wim Crouwel’s pages and pages of corporate logos, but not so much when I look at the old man’s girlie scrapbook photographed by Tsuzuki.

The question is partly answered by design company 2×4, interviewed in IDEA 313:

“A graphic design practice is a more or less aimless activity. Clients come and go. Projects fall into your lap or are ripped out of your hands without rhyme or reason. One day you are packaging architectural theory then shaving cream the next, making newspapers then wallpapers. On one hand the supposition is that your authorial vision is so solid, so codified, it can survive in any environment from the commercial to the cultural. On the other hand you are expected to be the perfect chameleon, effortlessly assuming your client’s hopes and desires.”

If this is top-down authorial authority, it’s a pretty haphazard and chaotic version. It sounds more like trying to balance on top of a giant rolling beach ball.

Kyoichi Tsuzuki doesn’t seem to think designers are much in control. “The design trade and profession are boring,” he’s said. “The art of reading clients’ moods is everything, while what passes for high-end professional quality, utterly bereft of any real vigor, creeps into every corner of the design world … Design was supposed to be something more exciting!”

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commeunegarce

My Japanese ex-boss told me not to read IDEA. Our clients were mainly salarymen and we were supposed to avoid making and even reading about, as he called it, “avant-gardiste design,” because our salarymen weren’t able to understand it. Somehow it was true, but I still read IDEA and I love it.

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Ah, the pleasures of transgression! Perhaps, though, commeunegarce’s comment helps us separate designers from Galbraithian top-down power. Salaryman design clients – the ones with the power – don’t understand or want avant-garde design. As a result, IDEA magazine exists as a sort of prestige product, somewhere on the aspirational margins of the design world; a sort of overflow, a safety valve, a utopian vision, a catalogue of exceptions (those few lucky designers with enlightened clients), a secret gentlemen’s club where enlightened values can prevail, a commonplace book of styles, an aspiration, an encouragement.

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(Anonymous)

Magazines such as this are about glamorizing design, design-as-Other. But for designers, design is not Other. Designers may flick through these mags, but it’s not where they’re going to get their ideas. You don’t get ideas from other people’s finished, polished ideas. You get them from raw materials. Just like a novelist is more likely to be inspired by a newspaper article or a documentary or a picture or a movie or something rather than another novel.

I wonder if IDEA manages to unite, in its pages, the apparently opposed views of Galbraithworld and Lomaxworld (top-down versus roots-up) precisely because they’re both threatened by ephemerality – the endless flux the net is now bringing? IDEA sings the unsung authors of form, whether they’re amateurs or pros. It makes commercial ephemera less ephemeral by treating it as if it really matters.

But IDEA is a paper product celebrating, for the most part, a paper world. And I wonder if the passing of the primacy of paper is a challenge to IDEA, and magazines like it? No sooner have they made us comfortable with the concept that commercial form has authors, and that these authors deserve to be seen and heard, than this radically destabilizing new medium comes along where there are suddenly millions of authors using flexible software platforms that look different in every browser, and can be scaled and customized by the consumer.

Who are the auteurs there? Neither amateurs nor pros, they’re nobody you can put a face to, nobody you can interview, nobody whose signature you can specify with carefully chosen, beautifully printed images. The new auteurs are everybody and nobody. And most designers hate this: they try to keep their authorial control over us by using Flash. We, the users, hate Flash, though. We have to wait for it to load, we have to re-learn how to navigate on every site. Or is it in precisely such a world – a world of bits – that atoms begin to matter differently? That the atomic support – in the form of expensive paper, and ink, and inserts – becomes an artform, rare and marginal? Is that why we’re more inclined to see designers as auteurs now? We’re prepared to pay a premium for paper because it’s no longer our window on the world, but an opaque pleasure-in-itself, like an abstract painting displaced by the representational power of photography.

Is IDEA a celebration of the “post-bit atom”? And is its celebration of atomic-age communication a retro gesture that’s entirely contemporary, or rather antique?

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crtzmo

I had a chance to visit IDEA’s publishing space in Ginza’s Recruit Building about five years ago … Seriously antiquated Macs, a dark, dank, cramped office. Three or four 30-ish women do the grunt production for the editor, and EVERYTHING is copiously proofed in the production process (thus the excuse for lackluster production computers and crappo monitors – everything is done off of the computer, just assembled on Macs during the production phase). An archive exists of every issue made, the first few are no different than the last couple that I’ve purchased … how rare is that?

IDEA must hate the web, with its lack of controllable color space, no typography to speak of – and thus shows very little interest in such. They’re stuck in the past, which perhaps turns some people off, but for me that’s the wonderful thing about it. They don’t really seem to be in competition with anybody, not a tool for the local ad man, etc. Indeed, a rare, special publication. I would call it a design JOURNAL, however, instead of a design MAGAZINE.

Tokyo-based designer Ian Lynam describes himself as an “avid fan”:

Only Emigré and Dot Dot Dot got close in terms of interesting content. I will gladly pay full cover price for IDEA in lieu of ilk like Print, Communication Arts, +81, IdN, Graphic, ID and most other design magazines … Almost every designer doing interesting work in the current milieu reads it.

Finally, someone who just calls himself “Richard” had his life changed:

IDEA inspired me to form a design group with some Japanese friends. No other magazine has had that effect on me, whether it was, ¥2500 or ¥25.

Flipping through Japanese design magazines, lounging in my comfortable chair high in that Ebisu office block, sipping umeshu and soda, I felt like I’d died and been ushered past a Japanese Saint Peter into some kind of creative person’s heaven. And somehow, only the best of the West had got in with me. Japanese sensibility was acting as a powerful “curation engine,” a filter, a frame. Some thorough, well-informed sifting had taken place, and, amazingly enough, the editorial decisions had all been good ones. It wasn’t what I was used to; I was used to seeing the wrong things being singled out, the wrong things being celebrated.

It could only happen, this excellent curation of excellence, in a culture with Japan’s peculiar internal dialectics. A culture both flat and hierarchical, safe and risk-taking, aristocratic and folksy, dandyish and practical, without a fine art tradition and yet capable of seeing everything as a kind of fine art, vigorously commercial yet rigorously selective, godless and yet capable of finding god in every detail. And, by that definition, IDEA – even when it’s looking Westward – is very Japanese.