Looking back at the birth of Japanese commercial art

In a Japanese publication from the late 1920s, a double page spread features an assortment of Edo-period lettering styles – stylised, squared characters used for household seals, ‘Peony’ characters forming characteristic wavy-edged circles, and ‘fat’ characters, their brushstrokes near-obscured by their corpulence – opposite an advertisement for Paul Renner’s geometric sans serif Futura. The text on the latter reads (in German): “The writing is the soul of each advertisement.”

Placing these letterforms side-by-side was Gendai shōgyō bijutsu zenshū, or The Complete Commercial Artist (TCCA), a 24-part series dedicated to the burgeoning field of commercial art, published between 1928 and 1930 by Tokyo-based Ars. TCCA documented not just graphic design, as the term might be interpreted today, but design as varied as building-scale advertisements, retail interiors, and product packaging – drawing examples from Japan and across the world.

Remembering this publication nearly a century on, is The Complete Commercial Artist: Making Modern Design in Japan, 1928-1930, a new book from Letterform Archive, authored by Gennifer Weisenfeld. Weisenfeld, a professor at Duke University specialising in modern and contemporary Japanese art history, explains that although fine art had been used in commercial settings earlier, it was only in the 1920s that it began to be recognised as a distinct sphere of professional practice – growing rapidly to keep pace with industrialised mass production, new materials and modernist ideas.