Today I stopped by the KDDI Designing Studio to see the new INFOBAR2 mobile phone from the AU Design Project, designed by Naoto Fukasawa. It’s still officially a prototype, but you just know that this thing will go retail. I didn’t manage to take many pictures of the different models because my camera batteries died while I was there, but the KDDI Designing Studio blog has pics of all the models that were on show.

Earlier today I also attended the press preview for Design Tide, which was held at their “Tide Exhibition” space (or main hall) on Meiji dori, not far from the crossing with Omotesando. I’m absolutely in love with the place they’ve chosen as a main exhibition spot — a renovated building that is still under construction, and will be turned into offices once the event is over. The whole place has a cool funky feel to it, and even though they were will quite busy putting stuff up, I really liked how everything was arranged, sort of in an unfinished way (yes, they were still putting stuff up, but a lot of the “booths” were done), with official “Design Tide” tape covering walls, chairs, well, pretty much everything. The whole idea behind this year’s edition is of recycling/re-using — especially exemplified by the “Treasured Trash” part — and so most of what is there is done with that spirit (even the seats we were sitting on during the press briefing were made up of parts from old office chairs and low desks). This “remixing” of the space is going to continue throughout the event, meaning no one knows how everything will turn out by the end. Even though I spent quite some time looking at things today, I’m already really looking forward to going back tomorrow for another look.

While I was at SuperDeluxe last night for our presentation, I picked up this giant Uniqlo free paper for their upcoming NYC launch, which looks just terrific. Great binding, and nice graphics throughout — you really need to get this. I did see that they had a few unopened boxes of them at the Design Tide “Tide Exhibition” space, at the entrance, so you should be able to get a copy there from tomorrow.

I attended the Swedish Style press presentation earlier today at the Embassy of Sweden — I was also there to drop some flyers and put up a poster up with Jesper for our “Nudie Cafe” event — where they are hosting works by the designers featured in this year’s edition of the catalogue: Lotta Kuhlhorn, Hanna Werning, and Saldo. I picked up the notebook you see pictured, a design by Kuhlhorn, for 500 yen. Lots of the patterns/graphics on display are quite nice, and I did take a lot of pictures, but like last year, you’ll see them pop up on MoCo Loco over the week.

I’ve put up another photoset, this time of shots taken during the Pecha Kucha Night presentation. Big thanks to Sonia Chow for taking these with my camera.

I’ve put up all the images used in the presentation — created by Jesper — up on my Flickr account in a photoset. To get the “piling” effect, I recommend viewing it in a slideshow.

I’ve been a fan of 9brand (Kujirushi) for quite a while, and was pleased to see a mention of their Furoshiki laptop bag on Cool Hunting. I’m thinking I could use one of these myself.

I had time to put a few images from the “Nudie Cafe” event up on my Flickr account — here’s a link to the photoset. I’ll add some more shots over the week.

As you can probably tell from the lack of posts over the weekend, it’s been a rather hectic couple of days, trying to get everything ready in time for the start of the “Nudie Cafe” event at Cafe Pause. We’ve now officially started (although the video installation will only start on Wednesday, when NIM arrives and can program everything), and I’ll try to post some pics later today. Let me remind you though that me and Jesper will be giving a presentation at the special Design Tide edition of Pecha Kucha Night tonight, as always, at SuperDeluxe. I believe we go first, so we’ll probably be starting at 20:30 or so. Jesper worked like crazy to get all the images done, which I think are going to look quite nice — the concept is that every slide builds on the previous one, with new pictures “piled” on the old ones. See you there!

Update
I’ve put up all the images used in the presentation — created by Jesper — up on my Flickr account in a photoset. To get the “piling” effect, I recommend viewing it in a slideshow.

Jon says goodbye to IMG SRC and PingMag — he’s about to launch a new venture called jonkenpon — and leaves us with a rather nice “top 10″ piece on getting organized.

PingMag has a piece up that looks at storyboarding. The sketch seen here is by director Kosai Sekine from a trailer he did.

I learned yesterday that along with Sonia, Kouichi Okamoto (Kyouei) will also be selling stuff at the Designboom Mart inside the 100% Design Tokyo venue.

And speaking of Sonia, she’s put up a new Rezidents wallpaper that you can download for use with your PSP.

Screen printing the tees from PMFKA for the “Nudie Cafe” event. We get them tomorrow, and they will be on sale at the cafe from Monday (which marks the start of the event).