While we work like crazy lil bees on the content and publishing system for Bite Sized Japan, we found time to put together a dummy front cover for the magazine. The artwork is from our archive and we’re trying to track down the original artist. Anyone know who created it?
Issue 1 demo cover. Who drew the anime girl?
I have mixed feelings about cover design. April 2010 being our first issue, and we really don’t want BiteSizedJapan.com to be seen as “just another Anime magazine”. After all, that’s not what we’re about. We’re a Japanese Culture magazine, and Japan is far more than Anime, Manga and schoolgirls (no, really!). We will be far broader in our exploration of Japanese culture.
A quick google of “japanese culture” kicks up 100′s of interesting web sites that touch on similar themes to BSJ. While many are packed with interesting information, the majority feel like academic web sites or wikis. Not that there’s anything wrong with either of these, but they are hardly inspire or catch the eye. There are obvious exceptions such as the rather excellent www.tokyocube.com or www.pingmag.jp (sadly no longer published). This is the “cool” end of the market, but both of them lack the magazine format that attracts me to working on Bite Sized Japan.
Finding a balance between the “cool” and “academic”, while trying to keep our magazine format*, is challenging. For our premier issue its really important for us to catch the eye of casual surfers, while managing to promote that we’re an information rich publication, rather than just lots of pretty pictures of anime girls and funny things in Japan.
* There is of course one small caveat to all of this: We’re not a printed magazine. Being exclusively online means that pretty welcome pages are a no go: we have to present the guts of our content to our readers (and the lovely GoogleBot) first-hit. Our cover page is unlikely to be the first page a reader will see when they come across our magazine as we’ve actually reversed the order from a traditional print magazine!
So, if you come up with a fab design with sexy typefaces and a wonderful layout… and then you can pretty much kiss that goodbye within a browser. After all, you are limited to a handful of rather dull typefaces, and until now there was very little you could do about that….
The solution? Well, over the past week or so I’ve been playing with the Cufon font library.
Cufon is a very clever tool that lets you upload fonts and reprocess them in a format that can then be displayed in almost all browsers. Simply including the Cufon script:
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”/script/cufon.js”></script>
…the font script (generated via their web site)…
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”/fonts/EurostileT_400-EurostileT_700.font.js”></script>
…and a simple jQuery call and you’re good to go:
Cufon.replace(“.myCssClass”);
Cufon will walk through your page and replace all instances of “.myClass” with your fancy font. It’ll even maintain the formatting (including colour).
We’ve tested this on Internet Explorer 6 and 7, FireFox 3.5 and Safari 4.1 and it works like a charm – and ideal tool for a type-heavy publication like a magazine (BiteSizedJapan).
Vixen has been scribbling again as we get closer with the BiteSizedJapan character designs.
Last night Sirin and I went to see Chan-wook Parks latest movie Thirst at the Filmhouse. Korean director Chan-wook Park is probably most famous (infamous!) for his Vengeance trilogy, which he followed with the visually (and emotionally) striking “I’m a cyborg”.
Unlike the slew of Vampire themed films that seem to be choking the cinemas at the moment, Thirst manages to breath new life into a worn-out genre I think. Mixing frankly stunning camera work, unflinching violence and a healthy dose of eroticism, Thirst explores the relationship between a priest with a dark secret and the girl next door… but I wouldn’t want to give too much away!
New artwork by Sirin for BiteSizedJapan
After last years eye-opening “Wild Japan” season at the Filmhouse, it’s really good to see one of its most infamous contributors getting a season of his own.
Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (our second movie this season) was quite an experience. Typically “adult” in nature, an Oshima trait, there was some startling cinematography and rather disturbingly honest scenes. This follows “Double suicide, Japanese Summer”.
Vixen has given Kammy-chan a gift… a beret!
More Kam poses
Adobe have released some details regarding the next release of PhotoShop. My instinct on hearing this was pretty much “meh, whatever”. PhotoShop CS4 was hardly overflowing with new features compared to CS3 after all (apart from rotating the canvas, which I adore). But Adobe have managed to pack in some interesting new features! The morphing tool from After Effects is in there, and 3D brushes (interesting), but I think the killer feature is the Corel Painter X style natural brushes. About time!
Soon as I saw these new graphics tablets were out from Wacom I couldn’t wait to get my hands on one. Combining a extra-large touch-pad plus a graphics tablet all in one sounded just fab.
After an impatient wait of a week, mine turned up this morning and I love it already!
Bamboo and MacBook
Bamboo close-up
The Bamboo has all the gesture functionality found on my Apple MacBook Pro’s native trackpad and iPhones, so its almost second nature using it. I find it more responsive that my aging 6″ Wacom tablet that I normally carry with the MacBook. Also the new “paper-like” surface is wonderful to draw on.
The Vixen put together some new poses! We’re getting there. Once we have Kameko’s look finally figured out, we’ll be creating the rest of her family.
Bemused Kammy-chan
We're not done yet...
These are still prototypes… here are a few other sketches from dear Chino:
More sketches from Chino
I really liked the “long hair” Kam, but I think we’ll maybe use this design for her sister.
