Beyond Making Logos.
VI / Packaging / Signage Planning / Design Systems
Methodologies for Creating Identities that move
This is the first book by Shogo Kishino (6D), an art director and graphic designer.
What the author excels at is the design of “-ness” / inherent character. In building an identity, he extracts the minimal elements that hold individuality, and by symbolizing design, constructs a visual system that expands from “point” to “plane.” When placed in an environment, the stance, tone, and details are purified—leading to a form that is new yet never alien, settling into what feels naturally right. He states that his work is not “branding,” but rather “raising the quality of communication.”
This book inventories the entire design practice—from hearing and research, through presentation, to witnessing implementation—revealing the full scope of a graphic designer’s work and strategy. For designers struggling through daily practice or young professionals exploring their careers, it offers clues to how visual communication can exist, and how a designer or organization can grow.
The first section, “Symbolizing Design,” focuses on the conceptual process of discovering and giving visual form to identity.
The middle section, “Beyond Ideas,” focuses on developing communicative capacity through real-world experience and relationships, and bringing design into reality.
The final section, “Self-propelled and Co-driven,” illuminates areas unreachable by individual ability alone—considering scale and duration in embedding design within organizations and society.
Contents
I. Symbolizing Design
What Visual Identity Is
Functions of visual identity / Logos are only an entrance / It is not branding / The moment for revision comes / Conditions of success / The scope of identity / Designers at the source
Orders and Research
Cultivating the commission / Beginning from being relied upon / Responding to parts with wholes / The ability to know the subject / Beyond agreement
Conditions for Individuality to Surface
Emerging from position / You understand it even if you don’t know / Don’t keep digging the wrong hole / Concepts are strategies / A contour found only here / When individuality becomes an image
Extracting the Point
Reaching at a glance / Seeing because it cannot be done / Strength of imagery / Images that survive / Grains and landscapes / Releasing into the wild
Designing “-ness”
Blueprints of atmosphere / Moving away from the center / Returning to the center / A world without “-ness” / A single form
Landscapes with Information
Places where information dwells / Open guidance / Already there from the beginning / Making before making / Updating as a requirement / The number of battles
Works of 6D
II. Beyond Ideas
Experience and Environment
The era as staff / Results are determined by preparation / Setting off carrying what has been absorbed / Forms that seep from the hands / Experiments with tactility / Collecting sensations
Roadmap
Before a good image / Knowing good design / Explaining good reasons / Understanding the equation of good design / Continuing to know / Handing over maps of thought
Direction
The position of guiding / Sharpening focus on meetings / Resolution that moves teams / Growth born from awareness / The responsibility to create the setting
Communication
Design progression as practical work / Why calls come / Estimates as dialogue / Better not to do it than to be careless / Holding the method of advancement / Toward where questions lead
Presentation
Delivering from the periphery / Mechanisms for being understood / Preparing the stage / Quantity never betrays / Listening to discomfort
Evaluation and Transmission
Effort to be discovered / What evaluation connects / A journey seeking the universal / Transmission is editing / Design on tiptoe
III. Self-propelled and Co-driven
Forming Teams
A place for sustaining work / An organization with non-designers / Moving the future ahead / Connecting teams / Scale for preparedness / Running by structure
Building Systems
Design systems that are required / Becoming design for users / Beyond permeation / Systems as forms for reaching / Structure creates place
Establishing Design
Techniques of assimilation / What grows over time / Beside implementation / The art of fading out / The presence of the in-between