Hosted by +81 Creatives – an editorial team for one of the Japanese creative magazines known as +81 – their first creative event TOKYO GRAPHIC PASSPORT took place over two days from October 11-12, with an aim to offer a place as a communication center for creative minds of the future. For their two main events entitled as Tokyo Visualist Symposium and International Magazine Conference, leading creators and art directors of creative magazines were invited from Paris, Berlin, New York, Singapore, Amsterdam, London and Tokyo to fully deliver their creative senses through the conference.

At the entrance of the event, the ticket was exchanged to a small notebook GRAPASS, which was actually used as a “passport” to get enter into the conference room.

For the first day for TOKYO GRAPHIC PASSPORT, the Tokyo Visualist Symposium was held introducing presentations by 6 different visual artists from Japan including Kohei Nawa (artist), Mika Ninagawa (photographer), Tomoko Konoike (artist), Shun Kawakami (art director/designer), Taisuke Koyama (photographer), Hideki Inaba (graphic designer), who all were once featured on the innovative art book Tokyo Visualist, discussing their own stories including their backgrounds how they got start working on creative jobs, their work processes, their past, current and future works, etc.

For the second day, the International Magazine Conference was held for offering a conference inviting seven groups of art directors and editors from the creative magazines around the world, where you can experience “pondering the creativity of magazines”. One-hour presentation was given by each guest speaker, including the former art director of “Purple Prose” Christophe Brunnquell, the co-publisher and editor-in-chief of “032c” Joerg Koch, creative directors of an experimental magazine “Newwork” Studio Newwork, the founding editors of “FANTASTIC MAN” Gert Jonkers and Jop Van Bennekom, the art director of “Intersection” Yorgo Tloupas, one of the leading graphic designers in Japan and art director of “CUT” Hideki Nakajima, and finally the creative director of “WERK” Theseus Chan, who all revealed interesting stories behind the making process of the magazine and ideas how they approach to make creative magazines.

In addition to the presentations by internationally active creators, the wide range of the creative magazines were also collected and sold at the event. In conjunction of this event, the latest +81 magazine “+81 Voyage” was also released, which you could experience again and think back on the event after you got back to your home. Expect to visit the second event in the future.

TOKYO GRAPHIC PASSPORT
Date: October 11th – 12th, 2009

http://www.grapass.net

Text & Photo: Kayo Tamura
Translation: Mariko Takei






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