For many designers, the dream mission is an id for a corporation they love. Aki Kanai and Taku Sasaki, working collectively as Kanaisasaki, bought to do it for the one which employs them. After 17 years at Kokuyo, the Japanese maker of stationery and workplace furnishings, the pair introduced a full redesign of its company id on the finish of final yr. “We’re very proud to have taken on this mission ourselves,” they are saying.
Each grew up in Tokyo; Sasaki studied product design at Tama Artwork College, and Kanai studied graphic design at Tokyo College of the Arts. They joined Kokuyo on the identical time, began speaking about design throughout their shifts, and ultimately started collaborating as a group of two artwork administrators. Their work for the corporate drew consideration and, after each gained the JAGDA New Designer Award, commissions began flooding in. They now break up their time between Kokuyo and different shoppers, and so they see that as a mannequin in itself: “by sustaining an impartial strategy to our work regardless of being in-house designers, we have come to imagine there could also be new fashions for design organisations and profession paths.” As a producer, Kokuyo additionally shapes what they make. “We’re exploring types of graphic design that individuals wish to personal – designs that turn out to be a part of their each day lives – reasonably than ads meant to convey info straight away.”
Working throughout completely different fields, they’re put in entrance of unfamiliar concepts often, and inspiration can come from many various corners. They “cherish these moments after we encounter issues we did not know earlier than”, and so they make certain to concentrate to small discoveries in each day life, too, “being conscious to not overlook them”.
After this, they get their heads down within the work. Considered one of them begins one thing, after which each have a look at it collectively and chat. Then, the opposite refines it, and so they swap recordsdata backwards and forwards till it is accomplished. “We place nice significance on working collectively as a pair to step away from our particular person views and preserve objectivity.” The variety of handovers, in fact, is dependent upon the job. Tight deadlines imply extra exchanges, and massive, lengthy initiatives imply many extra. Additionally they all the time have consumer and private initiatives working facet by facet, as a result of “the accrued expertise from each sorts of work positively influences one another”.
The Kokuyo id is an apt instance of this. The emblem is a daring black wordmark, which seems over diagonal blue stripes, repeated in a black-on-blue sample and turned mint inexperienced. The identical look is on the gray constructing’s signal, on paper buying baggage in mint and pink, pale inexperienced and blue envelopes, a grid of enterprise playing cards in numerous stripe colors, plus inexperienced, blue and black caps. The hand-shaped mug even wears the identical sample, displaying how the designers have made a package of some type. “We’re constructing a system that generates a variety of designs based mostly on easy but versatile guidelines,” they clarify. “To make sure the visible id retains tempo with – and at occasions even leads – the corporate’s ongoing evolution, we’re constructing a system that generates a variety of designs based mostly on easy but versatile guidelines, utilising visible parts together with the emblem design.”
In Prepared Made+, the pair designed a mission for Aki Venture, a model that works with Aji stone, which is often used for gravestones and constructing supplies. The stone yields loads of offcuts throughout manufacturing, and the pair designed graphics for each bit. On the posters for the November 2025 exhibits, stacks of those fragments steadiness collectively: a wedge of pale gray stones leans over a slab with a gap drilled by way of it, and a darkish spherical ball sits above a block with an ideal circle lower out. “We performed varied experiments – not solely to discover how the form of every scrap piece and the grain of the stone differ from each other, but in addition to find out how greatest to combine the uncooked, highly effective vitality of nature into our designs.” They describe it as a mission “that allowed us to interact purely with the act of design itself – one we wish to make our life’s work.”
Regardless of the consumer, they intention for a similar factor: “small moments of perception, pleasure and pleasure.” They need design to “mix seamlessly into the each day lives of its time”, whether or not on a luxurious product, a public signal or a bag for on a regular basis groceries. Additionally they desire a “heat strategy to design that lightly and quietly touches the hearts of these residing in circumstances the place the idea of ‘design’ could seem distant.”
