Ikko Tanaka
Though keenly sensitive to historical precedents and established conventions, Tanaka nevertheless maintained a degree of playfulness in his work, manipulating color, scale, and form to reconfigure familiar iconographies into fresh and accessible visual representations.
[2]: 21 In December 1960, Tanaka took his first overseas trip to the United States and connected with several graphic design contemporaries including Saul Bass, Aaron Burns, Herb Lubalin, Ivan Chermayeff, Lou Dorfsman, and Pieter Brattinga.
[3]: 24 He remained active in the design world until his death in 2002, producing an immense portfolio of work that spanned the private and public sectors, and engaged with numerous forms of media in varying scales and dimensions.
Though Tanaka's work is by no means monolithic and predictable, his overall sensibilities reveal interests in the potential for negative space to express matter, contoured forms, bold and simple geometries in novel arrangements, and vivid swaths of color, often rendered in opaque treatments.
His clean and precise applications of color and contour recall the defined forms of Edo period woodblock prints, while his spatial arrangements link to the recursive patterns of contemporaneous Op art, and the earlier playful, scattered geometries found in Bauhaus graphic design.
"[2]: 15 Tanaka maintained a careful balance between traditional and modern in his work, and actively drew inspiration from the mass consumer culture of America and precedents in European design, seamlessly integrating these visual languages with motifs and sensibilities drawn from Japanese aesthetics.
[3]: 24 These ideas percolate into his extensive work relating to theatre and other performing arts, and Tanaka played a critical role in the popular revival of Noh in the postwar era.
[10][11] In 1975, Tanaka was appointed creative director of the Seibu group, a holding company that encompasses railways, department stores, real estate, and numerous other industries under its umbrella.
[12] Together with marketing consultant Kazuko Koike and interior designer Takashi Sugimoto, Tanaka conceptualized the graphic identity for Mujirushi Ryōhin, a Seibu group discount brand founded as a response and respite to late capitalism’s brand-oriented culture.
As part of the company’s advisory board, Tanaka also played a vital role in product design, advocating for the embrace of the natural textures and colors of metal and wood materials, and pushing back against the use of pigments in synthetic plastics.
Typography figures prominently in Tanaka's work, and his engagement with the medium fell in line with a growing interest in the visual potential of text among young Japanese designers in the postwar era.
In one piece, he separates different stroke types into discrete forms that fill the surface of the picture plane, abstracting them from their original kanji contexts, while another work makes use of archaic pictogram characters, printed in white with a chalk-like texture against a black background.
[17][18] Later in his career, he developed a Bodoni-inspired Mincho typeface called "kōchō," which makes use of strong contrasts between thick and thin strokes, triangular uroko (serifs), and full osae (pressure).
