The best thing about graphic design is how closely it traces the mood of the day. If Japan over the last decade has been characterized by wishy-washy men who don't eat meat and a kind of wobbly-legged indecisiveness in response to the rise of China, then the graphic designer who has best catered to — and, inevitably, encouraged — that mindset is 45-year-old Kazunari Hattori.
For a print advertisement for a low-fat mayonnaise, he threw a cake up in the air and photographed it, slightly blurry in flight, against a wide blue sky. For the cover of a French-Japanese dictionary he forwent the usual authoritarianism of a heavy serif font, replacing it instead with a fine black text so wispy that the "s" in "Francais" is almost straight.
But, there's one thing that can be said for all this airiness: It feels great. Clean, liberating and delightfully artistic, Hattori's designs for advertisements give us airborne cakes where in the 1990s we would have been shown a plain old salad coupled with some thick-set catch-copy.
Hattori is now the subject of a retrospective at Tokyo's Ginza Graphic Gallery. If you'd like to get a feel for the times, this is a guaranteed shortcut.
"Kazunari Hattori: November 2010" continues at Ginza Graphic Gallery until Nov. 27. For details, visit www.dnp.co.jp/foundation
