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Your Guide to Design and Pop Culture in Tokyo

Books We Make

Books We Make

If you followed the link in my last post about next year’s Web Trend Map Atlas, you’ll find Oliver mention that the project will be done in collaboration with “Books We Make.” Visiting the website, I see that it’s a new project by Craig Mod, and I’m quite upset that I don’t know anything about it.

Web Trend Map Atlas

GaijinPot.com interviews Information Architect’s Oliver Reichenstein, in which he talks about the Web Trend Map, and reveals that for next year they are planning on releasing a book — a Web Trend Map Atlas — to be published just in time for Christmas 2010.

Web Trend Map

Web Trend Map

If you’re into the web and design, there’s a very good chance that you already know about Information Architect‘s annual Web Trend Map poster. Going one step further this year, iA teamed up with Craig Mod to create an online web app version of the map. The way it works is that when you populate a map with Twitter feeds, the system looks at all the links that are posted, and creates a “Trending Links” list, which appears in the sidebar on the left. It’s an awesome way to get a quick heads-up on what people — or “micro curators,” as iA and Craig describe them — are linking to and talking about. You need to have an account in order to create a map (and to do that, you need to purchase the original Web Trend Map poster), but anyone can access the maps already created.

My contribution comes in the form of my “Gamingsphere” map, which I describe thusly: “Tweeting games by people who play them, write about them, talk about them, and just plain love them.”

PauseTalk

PauseTalk is a regular series of events that take place at Cafe Pause on the first Monday of every month, with a start time of 20:00. The idea is to create a forum where Tokyo-based creatives can get together and discuss their own projects, as well as cultural currents of the city. The next edition is March 5.

We hereby define a new term, that of the magaziner, described as a person who exerts an unhealthy amount of love for all things magazine. The Magaziner is a site that mostly focuses on the intersection between magazines and the digital frontier, and what it means for the medium. This does not preclude the inclusion of a healthy amount of print love.

Codex is a weekly music podcast hosted by Jean Snow, recorded in Tokyo. Playlists for all episodes are posted on the site, and you can subscribe to RSS feeds of posts and episodes.

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.

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PechaKucha Global Cities Week

Jean Snow is Executive Director of the PechaKucha organization. He also helps run the PechaKucha Night in Tokyo -- please get in touch if you are interested in presenting at a future event. For a more intimate salon-like discussion group, join him at his monthly PauseTalk event.

A longtime resident of Tokyo, he lives and breathes design, pop culture, and gaming, sustained by an unhealthy addiction to magazines and frequent visits to his favorites cafes. He has reported on these obsessions for various online/offline publications, including the following: Time, Inside (Australian Design Review), Gizmodo, Gridskipper, Kotaku, 1UP, 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, Phaidon, and The Japan Times.

You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this site, and also follow him on Twitter and Facebook, or get in touch by email.

Neojaponisme

He serves as editor-at-large at Néojaponisme, a web journal covering social and cultural aspects of Japan. Read the manifesto, by founder and chief editor W. David Marx.

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

Colophon

The "Jean Snow" logo is written using the free Kirimomi Swash typeface. The "M31" logo is by Ian Lynam, and is part of a series of 31 unique designs. The site's design is based on the Grid Focus WordPress theme by Derek Punsalan.

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