The Japanese plum blossoms are blooming, and color is coming back to our urban world. I am doing my part at Starbucks and with fashion statements. As you know, I decorate coffee signs at three or four of my local Starbucks. Usually I use art nouveau or deco design elements which I find in my many sample books. But this time I am experimenting with design more in tune with current tastes. Design in this era is frenetic, driving, busy, fast-moving and confrontative. It's not made for languid Art Nouveau ladies but for caffeine-pounding go-getters whose lives move at the bang-bang-bang pace of video games or action movies. Therefore I referred to another design source entirely: Japanese children's game comics. Most of you who are over 15 have never heard of these games and cartoons. I picked a very popular one called "Yu-Gi-Oh" which is played by young folk all over the world. "Yu-Gi-Oh" also comes in comic book form in which characters play the card game in panels jam-packed with action and special effects. Since I have no interest in playing the game or even reading the comic, but only in the Japanese pictorial elements, I turned the comic book upside down and used only the designs with no reference to any character images or cards. Add a lot of coffee to the mix and here is what I came up with for one of my spring Starbucks signs.

Am I finally getting fashionable, by immersing myself in everything Japanese? Will I replace my big-eyed Byzantine icons with even bigger-eyed Japanese animation characters? Will I drop calculus and study Japanese instead? Perhaps I might abandon my Euro-centric fantasy world and re-cast everyone as sword-wielding Japanese? Well, I drive a Japanese car and enjoy sushi, that's a start. In fact, now not only can I drive my Honda, I can wear Honda shoes as well. On one of my many Websurfing journeys looking for colorful fashion accessories, I found that Honda had, at one point, sponsored a collector's item line of sneakers. Some of you know that I am a sneaker collector (very trendy) and that I specialize in orange, with some in blue as well. I was thrilled to find these Honda kicks in ELECTRON BLUE…made to match my car, whose color gave this Weblog its name! What was even nicer, since the Honda sneakers had been discontinued, their price was way low, less than fifteen dollars! Here is the splendid display, on the tailgate of the Electron Car. The difference is that while the car has four-wheel drive, I only have two.

Posted at 2:40 am | link