Editorial Design Today Vol.4: Mina Tabei
Design which reaches beyond the merely cute to capture the blips and blurry bits in the world of feelings.
In the fourth volume of our feature Editorial Design Today, we consider the work of Graphic Designer Mina Tabei, whose work you may have seen in our previous article on kvina. Tabei is currently working for Kazunari Hattori's company, whilst also doing projects with kvina and design jobs under her own name. In her capacity at the company, she is largely responsible for the editorial design for magazines such as 'Mayonaka' and various books, but when working freelance, Tabei says, she tends to concentrate more on graphic design projects, such as logos and posters. Tabei's design is cute but not sickly-sweet; you would be hard-pressed to describe it as girly, and yet there is no getting away from its prettiness. There's something about this kind of design that gets to you, that sticks with you. We have high hopes about her future in the world of editorial design!
We know that you said you haven't done a huge amount in the way of editorial design, but we asked you because we were really interested in what you had to say about your design. We hope that's okay! First of all, would you mind showing us the art book you worked on recently, 'I Love that You Love what I Love'? Gosh, it's so colourful! The colours have come out really well in the printing. Is this standard four-colour printing?
Mina Tabei: This book features the work of an artistic unit called Pip & Pop, formed of two girls who make installations out of sugar and sand in pretty, poppy colours. The installations are dismantled when the exhibitions finish, so they wanted to make a book of their works, and I was asked by their publisher to do the editorial design. They wanted the book to appeal especially to younger readers and therefore to keep the price to a minimum, so the budget was low. But I wanted to use this kind of fluorescent colouring, so I spoke with someone from the printing company, and we ended up using ink with a higher brightness and larger colour gamut than normal, so as to get shades which can't be achieved using normal four colour printing.
The title on the cover is cute but also pleasantly unfussy.
At first glance, Pip & Pop's work seems really cutesy, but the longer you look at it the more you start to see that the work is actually quite ascetic and professional. So rather than pushing the cute aspect from every angle, I set out to present it from a slightly detached perspective, in a plain and objective sort of way, to make people who hadn't seen their work before understand what it was about.
This here is the sort of work that you do with your company. Could you tell us a bit about the page design and style of the magazine Mayonaka?
The basic typesetting for Mayonaka (Artwork Director: Kazunari Hattori) has been set from the very first issue. We use a basic style, without any special features, designed so that readers will read the articles properly. But for the parts other than the text, for instance the spaces around the titles and the black spaces, we use lots of abstract graphics which are often only loosely connected with the articles, and ensure that regular features are changed every time so that they seem new, and excite the readers' enjoyment. I try to make the design slightly cheerful in tone, to try to avoid its becoming too serious.
I've seen these envelopes before. With these green strips down the edge, they're really cleverly designed, but they remain very presentable.
These were originally made as novelty items for CLASKA Gallery & Shop "DO" to sell at the PARCO Wedding Fair, but then they continued to be sold after that. There are two kinds: pochi-bukuro (small money envelopes), and goshugi-bukuro (special gift envelopes used for weddings and similar). You see a lot of gift envelopes with fancy designs, but those which are actually better designed that the traditional ones are rare. I think that's because the form itself is perfect, somehow. I wanted to do something attractive that was different from the original object, without losing what was good about the traditional design. So without using any special shapes, I just combined very basic forms like circles and squares, keeping it as minimal as possible. With the pochi-bukuro, I feel as though the graphics used there are connected somehow to the sense of enjoyment that I take in finding ways to fill up the blank space for the titles of Mayonaka, that's built up in me through time.
In the fourth volume of our feature Editorial Design Today, we consider the work of Graphic Designer Mina Tabei, whose work you may have seen in our previous article on kvina. Tabei is currently working for Kazunari Hattori's company, whilst also doing projects with kvina and design jobs under her own name. In her capacity at the company, she is largely responsible for the editorial design for magazines such as 'Mayonaka' and various books, but when working freelance, Tabei says, she tends to concentrate more on graphic design projects, such as logos and posters. Tabei's design is cute but not sickly-sweet; you would be hard-pressed to describe it as girly, and yet there is no getting away from its prettiness. There's something about this kind of design that gets to you, that sticks with you. We have high hopes about her future in the world of editorial design!
We know that you said you haven't done a huge amount in the way of editorial design, but we asked you because we were really interested in what you had to say about your design. We hope that's okay! First of all, would you mind showing us the art book you worked on recently, 'I Love that You Love what I Love'? Gosh, it's so colourful! The colours have come out really well in the printing. Is this standard four-colour printing?
Mina Tabei: This book features the work of an artistic unit called Pip & Pop, formed of two girls who make installations out of sugar and sand in pretty, poppy colours. The installations are dismantled when the exhibitions finish, so they wanted to make a book of their works, and I was asked by their publisher to do the editorial design. They wanted the book to appeal especially to younger readers and therefore to keep the price to a minimum, so the budget was low. But I wanted to use this kind of fluorescent colouring, so I spoke with someone from the printing company, and we ended up using ink with a higher brightness and larger colour gamut than normal, so as to get shades which can't be achieved using normal four colour printing.
The title on the cover is cute but also pleasantly unfussy.
At first glance, Pip & Pop's work seems really cutesy, but the longer you look at it the more you start to see that the work is actually quite ascetic and professional. So rather than pushing the cute aspect from every angle, I set out to present it from a slightly detached perspective, in a plain and objective sort of way, to make people who hadn't seen their work before understand what it was about.
This here is the sort of work that you do with your company. Could you tell us a bit about the page design and style of the magazine Mayonaka?
The basic typesetting for Mayonaka (Artwork Director: Kazunari Hattori) has been set from the very first issue. We use a basic style, without any special features, designed so that readers will read the articles properly. But for the parts other than the text, for instance the spaces around the titles and the black spaces, we use lots of abstract graphics which are often only loosely connected with the articles, and ensure that regular features are changed every time so that they seem new, and excite the readers' enjoyment. I try to make the design slightly cheerful in tone, to try to avoid its becoming too serious.
I've seen these envelopes before. With these green strips down the edge, they're really cleverly designed, but they remain very presentable.
These were originally made as novelty items for CLASKA Gallery & Shop "DO" to sell at the PARCO Wedding Fair, but then they continued to be sold after that. There are two kinds: pochi-bukuro (small money envelopes), and goshugi-bukuro (special gift envelopes used for weddings and similar). You see a lot of gift envelopes with fancy designs, but those which are actually better designed that the traditional ones are rare. I think that's because the form itself is perfect, somehow. I wanted to do something attractive that was different from the original object, without losing what was good about the traditional design. So without using any special shapes, I just combined very basic forms like circles and squares, keeping it as minimal as possible. With the pochi-bukuro, I feel as though the graphics used there are connected somehow to the sense of enjoyment that I take in finding ways to fill up the blank space for the titles of Mayonaka, that's built up in me through time.
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