JAPAN | art director | graphic designer
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Born in Osaka in 1970, Masayoshi Kodaira is the principal of FLAME Inc., a graphic design studio based in Tokyo. Clients include Yokohama Museum of Art, ART FAIR TOKYO, ‘Esquire Magazine’ Japan, LOUIS VUITTON. Masayoshi has designed posters and books for the exhibition of Yoshitomo Nara, ARCHIGRAM, etc. Most recently, he has collaborated with PLEATS PLEASE ISSEY MIYAKE to create a line of bags. Awards include D&AD Silver (Fukutake House), ONE SHOW Silver, The Art Directors Club Distinctive Merits(NY), The Type Directors Club(NY), Japan Graphic Designers Association, and Tokyo Art Directors Club. “Masayoshi Kodaira’s ‘Fukutake House’ project harmonizes typography and architecture with a feeling for space, scale, material, and form ... is inventive, gracefully restrained, and packed with purpose and meaning.”
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Upon hearing ‘typography’, there may be those for whom the shape and composition of characters depict a certain original form. It is this depiction, or recollection in one’s mind, that Masayoshi Kodaira explores in his projects. Much of Kodaira’s work employs ‘normal fonts, without processing’, and as he puts it, “I do not think that I have treated ardently 'typography’, so it is a surprise to be invited to TypeSHED11 ...”. Kodaira tracks his propensity for the vernacular back to movies of the 70s, where opening title sequences would often be displayed as repeating rows of plain characters layered over images. ‘I DON’T MIND, IF YOU FORGET ME’ / NARA YOSHIMOTO (exhibition signage) is a project which involved designing a sign on a brick brewhouse, referencing old films - original ‘scenery from memory’ translates into ‘scenery of reality’. ‘FUKUTAKE HOUSE’ is another project where Kodaira’s typography is a façade on an ex-elementary school, a similar concept, but with the added layer of change that wind and rain (lapse of time) would bring to the project. As words, Kodaira says, the meaning may be clear, but as they become part of scenery and printed matter, the depth of meaning increases, and so becomes part of and remains in, one’s memory.
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