I mentioned the upcoming PechaKucha Global Cities Week event last week, and now we have some banners ads to share (also designed by Ian), in a variety of colors and sizes. If you’d like help spread the word on the event, you can download them here — and you can point to the front page of the PechaKucha website, which will get updated later today with more info.

And don’t forget that PechaKucha Night Vol. 88 happens this Wednesday at SuperDeluxe from 20:20 (doors open at 19:00).

We’ve just officially announced details for our upcoming PechaKucha Global Cities Week, and I really hope you will all be able to find a PechaKucha Night in your city that you can attend — and dig the great logo design by my main man Ian Lynam. The event in Tokyo will happen on Thursday, February 23 (note that it’s not on the regular Wednesday), and we’re currently on the hunt for some great presenters — if you’d like to take part with a topic that relates to our dear Tokyo, get in touch!

In the meantime, this month’s PechaKucha Night (Vol. 88) is happening next week (Wednesday, January 25, at SuperDeluxe), and it looks like it’s going to be a great night of presentations, with quite a few friends and fellow PauseTalkers participating. And speaking of PauseTalk, the first edition of 2012 is coming up, with Vol. 57 set for Monday, February 6.

As of a couple of weeks ago I’ve started spending more time at the Klein Dytham architecture office in Ebisu, and that’s given me an excuse to do a lot of biking again. That’s still my bike pictured above, a Bianchi BD-1, that I bought from Craig Mod close to 3 years ago. At first I told myself I’d maybe go to the office by bike on one day a week, but so far I’ve been doing it more often, and rather looking forward to the ride.

From my home in Ikebukuro to the KDa office takes me about 40 minutes, with a distance of around 10km — even though it’s a very easy ride, since I’m pretty much just on Meiji street from start to finish, things always slow down around Shinjuku, when I start hitting all those traffic lights. I had a blast last night when I left the office after a meeting with Ian Lynam and Mark McFarlane, as we all biked together until Shibuya before separating, side-by-side on one lane (traffic was light).

And yes, this does mean that I’m out and about more, being based in Ebisu (and often with a bike), and can be easily bribed by coffee or drinks if you want to meet up with me.

Just over a week ago I attended the launch party for the second issue of TOO MUCH magazine, held at the United Bamboo store (in the building’s event space) in Daikanyama. TOO MUCH is of course the follow-up to OK FRED magazine, and is still helmed by the editorial duo of Yoshi Tsujimura and Audrey Fondecave (my fellow Radio OK Fred podcasters). The party doubled as an exhibition based on a feature written by another good friend, Ian Lynam, of which you can see more here. You can buy a 2-issue subscription to TOO MUCH (it’s published twice-annually) here.

After the reception, we walked down towards Nakameguro to get some drinks at Just Another Space, which is a rather funky spot — and hey, there’s ping-pong table there too.

Also, if you’re curious as to the effect I’m putting on these photos (which I also did for the haircut post), I’m using a series of actions in Photoshop that replicate the filters found in Instagram — in each case, I’ve applied “Hefe,” followed by “Brannan.” You can download them here (and thank you Nick Chester for the tip on this).

My good friend Ian Lynam recently created a typeface family called Kirimomi for Onitsuka Tiger, based on the company’s history, and available as free downloads. It appears that there have already been over 10,000 downloads of the fonts, and in celebration I’ve decided to change the logo on this site to what you see now, which uses Kirimomi Swash.

Go and do something with them too — “just do it” (oops, that’s another company I think).

Maybe “Tightening the Belt” is not really the best way to describe what I’ve been doing of late, but I am on a trajectory to make my online presence a bit leaner (and maybe even a bit meaner). As I announced a week ago, I’ve put SNOW Magazine on indefinite hiatus, and I’ve done the same with my little GAME site. 

Yes, I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I just can’t handle all of the things that I’d like to be doing online, at least in terms of my personal projects (i.e. the stuff that doesn’t bring in income). It was getting to the point where I’d feel guilty about not updating these various sites, and I finally figured that enough was enough.

For now, and for the foreseeable future, expect me to stick to just The Magaziner, new episodes of the Codex, the monthly editions of PauseTalk, and the odd scribblings here — there’s another podcast project that I’d like to get off the ground too. 

As for the day job — I’m Executive Director of the PechaKucha organization — things have never been more exciting, and we have a lot of very cool things in the works. It’s also been a pleasure to be working more closely with my good friend Ian Lynam, who has taken on the big task of refreshing our visual identity and online presence.

If you’ve been to the front page of this site sometime this week (I have to assume that many of you reading this in your feed reader), then more than likely you’ve noticed the giant banner I have there now. It’s for the big Global PechaKucha Day – Inspire Japan event I’ve been working on over the past few weeks, set to happen this Saturday (April 16). I alluded to it in a recent post, but if you don’t know about it, it’s a big charity event we’ve put together, bringing together the PechaKucha community — we’re 404 cities strong, as of this writing — for a day/night of events all over the world, with the goal of raising funds for reconstruction efforts in Japan. As with last year for Haiti, we’re teaming up with Architecture for Humanity.

The core of the event is on Saturday, with a whole bunch of cities holding PKNs, and a lot of them will be streaming live as well — just go to the Inspire Japan site on the day of the event, and whatever is currently streaming live should be up at the top of the site. But our Inspire Japan efforts will also span all of April and May, and we’re inviting organizers of all PKNs during this period to collect donations — because this all came together so suddenly, many cities were not able to re-schedule already planned events, and some just found it difficult to organize something on the 16th.

Here in Tokyo, instead of our regular home of SuperDeluxe, the event will be held at the Roppongi Hills Tokyo City View (52nd floor), with doors opening at 17:00, and presentations starting at 18:00 (it should run until around 21:30 or so). Entry will be a minimum donation of 1000 yen — you’re of course welcome to leave more. To access the event, you’ll need to go to the 3rd floor to get a free ticket to get to the top, and we’ll have signs there to point you to the event space (where you’ll pay the entry fee).

This will also be the first time I present in quite a while — I only presented once at a PechaKucha Night, 3-4 years ago at a special Tokyo Design Week edition with my friend Jesper (it was about the Swedish Style event we had organized at Cafe Pause). This time, I’ll be teaming with Ian, who is responsible for all of the Inspire Japan graphics you’ve been seeing. The presentation will pretty much be about design efforts to raise money for Japan aid, based on that post I started a few days after the quake, as well as the follow-up I did in last month’s edition of my “On Design” column for The Japan Times. For his part of the presentation, Ian will cover the projects he worked on to help raise awareness and collect donations.

The event should be amazing — I mean, you can’t really beat that view — and you’ll also be contributing to reconstruction efforts, so I urge you all to come and support us. Also, if you’d like to help spread the word, feel free to get and use Inspire Japan banners and ads that Ian created, as well as a very cool (and workable) QR code that SET Japan designed for us.

I mentioned in my charity post that OPEN Skateboards were donating proceeds of all deck sales to disaster relief, and now Ian has gone and designed a new deck (above) specifically to help raise funds — you can pre-order it now (sorry, they couldn’t get an official release date on it yet). 

The image on the left is the bottom, and the one on the right (the top) will be red paint on black stained wood.

Tomorrow night (Wednesday, November 24) isn’t any old PechaKucha Night, nope, it’s actually the last one of 2010, since December is always a skip month. So come on down to SuperDeluxe for what is looking like a great night of presentations, including my pal Ian who is promising to give away free stuff, and Audrey who will be talking about TOO MUCH magazine. If you want to say hi, just drop by the front either before or during the beer break, as I sit at the front next to Mark and Astrid.

I’ve recently mentioned a few times the new skate brand OPEN, started by my friend Trevor Sias with designs by Ian Lynam — you can order the first two boards now, and here are a few more photos — but here’s a look at the latest deck collection from Japan skateboard brand Lesque, also designed by Ian.

Here’s a look at an upcoming t-shirt for OPEN Skateboards, based on the Kiyoshi Awazu homage board. The tees will be very limited, and should go on sale on the site soon.

Free Copy Tokyo is a zine by LA-based graffiti writer Eyeone created during a recent trip to Tokyo, covering the graffiti scene. You can download a free PDF version of it here. Ian Lynam contributed the logo.

I haven’t linked to any in a while, but Ian Lynam continues to post his series of red, white, and black patterns based on Japanese graphic design of the 50s over at Neojaponisme, with the latest pictured above.

A look at the current lineup of boards from OPEN — all designs are by Ian Lynam.

Following its debut at the recent TAB 5th anniversary party, Mammal — the band/dance unit composed of Ian Lynam and Mari Kojima — returns for another performance, this time during the upcoming PechaKucha Night in Tokyo Vol. 67, which happens December 2 at SuperDeluxe.