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Your Guide to Design and Pop Culture in Tokyo

This Week in Magazines

Uniqlo

  • RELAX continues to experiment with its layout and design, and this month goes glossy! It’s also thicker than it was, but there’s something about the glossy pages that just doesn’t feel right. After releasing a nice couple of issues (following a disastrous relaunch), it looks like they’re heading in the wrong direction again.
  • This month RELAX also releases an all-Uniqlo mook. Brilliant piece of marketing actually — it’s basically a catalog made to look like an issue of RELAX. It seems like the brand is really pushing for some cred this year, something they will continue to do with the launch next week of their Seleqlo shop (April 23 to May 22), located at Rocket Gallery in Aoyama. It’s Uniqlo trying to crossover to the Harajuku/Aoyama crowd, and I’ll admit that I absolutely want that Groovisions tee that was featured in the mook, even if it has a Uniqlo logo on it. Could this finally be the year that Uniqlo comes out with a decent tee line?
  • BRUTUS looks at out-of-the-ordinary jobs, framing their story as a search for a job that will really make you happy. Again, the slow movement gets some mainstream attention.
  • CASA BRUTUS has a cover feature on museums of the 21st century, and somehow it seems like we’ve seen this type of article (or at least the buildings featured) one time too many in recent months. Sure, it’s nice architectural porn, but not particularly exciting.
  • PEN suggests shops where a man can have a meal alone. Mostly a look at counter-centric restaurants, and a lot of them French.

Category: Magazines

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Jean Snow is a contributor to Arcade Mania, your guide to the arcade gaming scene in Japan (Amazon US/Amazon Japan). He also provided assistance on Tokyolife: Art and Design, a guide to Tokyo's cultural output of the past few years, covering the works of over 80 influential creatives.
He will be contributing to the upcoming fifth editions of The Rough Guide to Tokyo and The Rough Guide to Japan, due for release in 2011.
Jean Snow lives and breathes design, pop culture, and gaming in Tokyo -- sustained by an unhealthy addiction to magazines and frequent visits to his favorites cafes. He has reported on these obsessions for the following online/offline publications: Time, Inside (Australian Design Review), Gizmodo, Gridskipper, Kotaku, Tokyo Q, Superfuture, OK Fred, Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel, I.D. (International Design), Metropolis, Azure, MoCo Loco, Kateigaho International Edition, Wired's Game|Life, PingMag, CNNGo, and The Japan Times. He also manages the gallery space at Cafe Pause.

He writes a monthly column covering Japanese product design for The Japan Times, called "On Design." It appears on the fourth Thursday of every month, in both the print edition and online.

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