The 8th Asian Cartoon Exhibition will be happening in Akasaka at The Japan Foundation Forum from October 23 to November 11. Sounds like it could be interesting. Here’s what REALTOKYO has to say:

As you might or might not guess from this event’s brutally frank title, on display here are comics that do not belong to the geek world of otaku, and that do not even look as if they had real stories. Participating are 13 creators of comic strips, caricatures for newspapers, and others from China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Sounds a bit tedious indeed, but from such works one can often understand a country’s culture. People are always talking about the influence of Japanese manga on comics, but this exhibition shows clearly how especially also artists from other East-Asian countries keep influencing each other with their original styles and remarkable creativity.

This is what the custom made White Label camera looks like. We send it out to all our artists and stores to document the project.

I was very happy the other day when Colette in Paris returned the camera we had sent them after delivering our first White Label t-shirt collection. The picture shows a part of the White Label concept, with t-shirt packaged in 12″ white record sleeves. No time to explain it all: read more about the projekt at the White Label homepage (soon to be updated).

Got the following two books from Amazon Japan:

MTIV: Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer by Hillman Curtis.

CSS Pocket Reference by Eric A. Meyer.

Can’t wait to have a crack at them, although as the title suggests, the CSS book is more for reference. Can you tell I’m in a design state of mind these days?

Some more street designs from Shibuya.

The new Dell DJ portable music player. Yup, that’s an original design. Never seen that kind of form factor before. Kudos. Oh, and they continue their innovation streak with their very own Digital Music Store.

Our great spam savior Jay Allen has just released version 1.5 of his excellent program MT-Blacklist, and it features a new ability to clean up spam that’s already appeared in your commenting system. I’ve been doing great ever since installing the last version (after the deluge of spam comments I was the target of, which was also killing my Mail progam with all the notification messages I was getting). Definitely a must-install for all you bloggers out there who use the Movable Type software to power your blogs.

I’m rather busy of late working on the redesign of the site (fingers crossed for a launch in a week or two), and yet I still find myself creating pages of GEISHA. I get an idea while doing something, and then try something different with it, and lo and behold I end up with an image that I would like to put in a new issue of GEISHA. Damn it, I’m not supposed to be doing that, I need to concentrate on the redesign, must not do anything else…

As far as the redesign goes, I think I’m almost satisfied with what the homepage will end up being, and now I need to start fleshing out the rest of the site, and creating content for the other pages. For example, I plan on creating a more detailed “about” page, including a colophon, as well as a look back at the previous versions of the site (and maybe even my 3 and a half run of columns I wrote for my previous site, AS).

A new essay is up at Momus’ site. 1998 Forever. Now let’s get him back to Tokyo for some more shows!

since october there is a new design over at Being Hunted. A lovely site for people who wanna stay up to date with street fashion / street art / sneakers etc. It’s in my quicklist of links. As you can see I use a PC, but I long for an attractive apple. Can’t figure out why there aren’t any well designed PCs out there.

After the Future Design Days event we went to Bliss for a quick beer (I had a Cider since I prefer it instead of beer). I like this place. They serve really good food, the staff is nice and when there’s a party, you can really party. I have always wondered how they managed to keep the modern interior so nice and clean, despite the hard partying?

Tonight I went to an short introduction event for this years edition of Future Design Days, a design festival in the small town of Boras, south of Gothenburg. I visited the event last year, had a jolly good time and was both impressed and surpriced by the magnificant arrangement. Along with many others it seems, since Future Design Days won the “event of the year”-award at SHIE + Event Solutions 2003 conferences.

The event is organized by the lovely people at Futurelab and this year they were kind enough to take us in as partners. The event takes place in November and I am really looking forward to spending some quality time with the worlds design elite. For you japan-freaks Astrid Klein & Mark Dytham may seem familiar since they are based in Tokyo. Also Kym Barret (costume designer for Matrix etc.) might interest you – just to name a few.

This is where I live (top-left apartment on the ninth floor) together with my friend Ola. Our small tokyo-sized apartment is situated in a suburb to Gothenburg, Swedens second largest city. This picture is taken from our tram-station. I love the functionalistic architecture of our building and I try to photograph it once every day from the same spot.

This is me now. My name is Jesper Larsson and I’m the brand new guestblogger at Tokyo Boy. First of all: big shout out to my main man in tokyo, mr Jean Snow who let’s my share my swedish life though this homepage. This despite the fact that he knows I’m rather selfcentered and egocentric and will use this oppertunity to promote myself and my projects (Please let me know when you grow tired of me). Let the blogging begin!

As you arrive to the entrance of Planet 3rd, this is what you see before you enter the cafe. I like the way they use the fridge to display flyers.