Poster, 15th Summer Jazz Festival

This group of 21 posters by the Japanese designer Takenobu Igarashi represents the arc of his graphic design career from the mid-1970s through the early 1990s. An early experimenter with emerging digital technologies, Igarashi incorporated devices such as the photocopy machine to create visual effects and multi-layered designs. However, he was most drawn to the drafting machine, a tool intended for architectural design that enabled him to experiment with axonometric drawings and scientific and mathematical forms. “By erasing the vague nuances of freehand drawing and working with solid geometric figures in a scientific and mathematical manner, using my tool and method, I was, in a way, rebelling against the main design trend of that time with a strong emphasis on illustration.”[1] These architectural alphabets, in which Igarashi treats letter forms like architectural plan views, have become an iconic foundation of graphic work. “I’ve always wanted to transcend the communicative function of letters and characters,” Igarashi has written, stating that he wished “to capture their form in a dimension other than the usual phonetic usage. For me, thinking about letters and characters is the same as thinking about the basics of design. My imagination was inspired by their form and structure—for one can learn about line and space by studying letters and characters.”[2]

Poster, 15th Summer Jazz Festival; Designed by Takenobu Igarashi (Japanese, b. 1944); Printed by KY Printing Co., Ltd.; Client: Nippon Cultural Broadcasting, Inc.; lithograph on paper; 72.8 × 51.5 cm (28 11/16 × 20 1/4 in.); Gift of Takenobu Igarashi; 2018-18-18