Japan’s Best Friend: Dog Culture in the Land of the Rising Sun is a new title by Manami Okazaki for Prestel Publishing, edited by Ali Gitlow and designed by Nina Jua Klein and John Philip Sage. The book explores how dogs have permeated Japanese life, from historical themes to contemporary visual culture.
The Katakana typeface is called Kachi-Buwa and has been designed by Emi Takahashi a Toronto-based graphic and type designer. Kachi-Buwa ‘investigates how design can communicate the nuances in connotations and culture-specific context expressed by onomatopoeia in the Japanese language’, allowing us to include various Japanese expressions of sound, specific to dogs.
To amplify but also unify the vibrant and diverse content of the book the yellow colour channel of the four colour print was replaced with a fluorescent yellow Pantone. This substitution gave us the opportunity to use the solid yellow Pantone throughout the book but also to add vibrancy to the imagery.
Designed by Nina Jua Klein and John Philip Sage
Edited by Ali Gitlow
Author Manami Okazaki
Publisher Prestel
