Of course, the more I write, the easier it’s gotten to identify what makes something feel like me. I’ve realised the deciding factor is less about the exact words – or even the specific subject – than the overall remit of a piece: whether what I’m writing gives space for me to express how I think about the world. Both my writing and my design tend to come out of the same place: a love of history, and an interest in ideas that don’t resolve cleanly. My design work usually starts with research – looking at references, collecting examples, and trying to understand where something comes from and how it’s been used before. My favorite writing follows the same path: something I’ve noticed in the world works its way outward from a small idea and gets connected to a broader context. Seeing the overlap between my disciplines has made it easier for me to understand writing not as something separate from design, but as another way of working through the same set of questions.
Once I started to notice this overlap in my own work, I began to see it more clearly in others, too. For some people, that connection is especially visible – their writing and their work circle the same inquiries, even as the format changes. One of my favourite examples of this kind of synthesis is the work of It’s Nice That’s Tokyo correspondent, Ray Masaki. He’s the founder of Studio RAN in Tokyo as well as a design critic who has taken on subjects like institutional white supremacy in design and the illustrations on mass Japanese signage. Plainly speaking, I enjoy the quality and tone of Ray’s writing: it always reads as someone thinking through something in real time, rather than presenting a neatly resolved, but often reductive, conclusion. It’s careful without being cautious, and specific without trying to resolve all the problems it raises. But more than that, I love how clearly I can understand what he’s interested in as a person from seeing his writing alongside his work. In journalistic terms, this is often called having a “beat” – a consistent set of questions or subject matter that someone returns to over time, approached from different angles. His essays tend to start from specific observations – advertising, packaging, language – and widen into questions about history, identity, and power.
He writes across a range of subjects, but, informed by his experience as a Japanese American who moved to Tokyo almost a decade ago, often returns to stories about cultural mistranslations and Japanese visual culture. This particular personal position seems to allow for a kind of double vision, where he’s able to see things from both inside and outside at once without fully settling into either. That same perspective carries into his design work. You can see it in projects that deal with translation and context – like adapting an international brand for a localised audience or running workshops about how creative coding can be used to address social issues. His writing doesn’t separate from his design practice, nor his design from his writing. Each seems to offer a way of working through questions that don’t resolve cleanly in either form on its own.