Signage of Shizuoka City Museum of Art

By Calvin C | Published: August 5, 2010

Signage of the Shizuoka City Museum of Art. Love the minimal, coherent, rich of white-space design.

The designer is 柿木原政広. The design agency website is at http://www.10inc.jp/.

According to the information desk personnel, the logo resembles the shape of Mt. Fuji, rather than a caramel pudding that I have first imagined. The logo designer also infuses this idea into the custom typeface, so the “UO” and “MS” couple in the museum name also has similar design. You can see more of the custom typeface in the designer’s website.

Shizuoka City Museum of Art

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Local Map in Train Station with Mobile Phone “Touch Download”

By Calvin C | Published: August 4, 2010

I am seeing a lot of local map in train stations that has a “touch download” feature, which allows mobile phone users to download local business information simply by taping their FeliCa-powered mobile phone to the sensor.

FeliCa is a RFID technology offered by Sony that allows touchless money and data transaction. The technology is currently being widely used by Japanese public transit and electronic payment systems.

Unlike QR-code, this touchless RFID is supposed to be much quicker in response time. Theoretically the user can conveniently and instantly get the information on their phone without touching any button on the keypad.

On the other hand, using of this technology is only limited to Sony’s business partner and those who can afford to install a FeliCa transceiver. Also, such transceiver would consume electricity, so it might not work when there is a power outage. In that case, QR-code is still a better offline (zero electricity required) alternative. Also, since QR-code is a loyalty free technology, you can freely incorporate the code into posters and marketing materials.

Unfortunately I don’t own a FeliCa compatible mobile phone so I couldn’t record a video clip of it in use.

Wikipedia on Sony FeliCa technology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeliCa

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McDonalds QRcode Shows Nutrition Information

By Calvin C | Published: July 28, 2010

McDonalds Japan uses a lot of QR-code technology as marketing tool. In a purchase of drink and snack, I could find 4 codes on the placemat and the potato bacon pie package.

I particularly like the code on the pie package, which leads you to McDonald’s nutrition site. The interaction flow is like this:

  • A customer purchases a pie and happily sits down to enjoy it.
  • Being a health conscious individual, the customer is quite concerned about how much nutrition and calories the pie has.
  • The customer pulls out his/her mobile phone, snaps the code and immediately sees the nutrition information about the pie in great detail. After knowing that the calories in this pie doesn’t exceed the daily limit, he/she feels save and happy to enjoy it without hesitation. Yum!

My thoughts:

Nutrition Campaign — McDonald’s can run a campaign to promote health conscious living, by creating free mobile app that let you scan food and automatically calculate the daily total calories consumption. The app is just a very simple QR-code scanner, which would recognize the code of the food you are eating (and also allow manual editing), and then automatically pull from the database the calories and nutrition values such as sodium, iron, fat and so on, and present a table of individual items as well as the daily total. It can also remember the data of previous days to generate historical charts.

Since most people perceive McDonalds as an unhealthy fast food restaurant, I think it would be nice for them to run such campaign to improve their public image and help marketing.

Testing Japanese Mobile Websites — tips to test mobile sites for Japanese mobile phone from desktop browser:

  • Change your browser’s user agent to one of the listed agent on Docomo‘s spec page:
    http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/service/imode/make/content/spec/useragent/
  • For this test, I just randomly picked this user agent with support of Browser 2.0:
    "DoCoMo/2.0 F04B(c500;TB;W30H25) (Communicating from the browser(vertical full screen))"
  • Turn on Safari “Develop” option to enable custom user agent.
  • Change the Text-encoding to “Japanese (Shift JIS)” if your browser is not already defaulted to Japanese encoding.

More photos:

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Season Colour – I Think Spring is Green

By Calvin C | Published: July 27, 2010

If I pick a colour to represent Spring, the colour would be Light Green because it reminds me of sprouting grass and trees [1]. But interestingly when asking some Japanese friends for a colour of Spring, they all choose Pink because it is the colour of the cherry blossom (桜咲き) [2].

This is a good example of how people from different countries would perceive different meanings on abstract concepts, such as the association between colour and season. However, when I tried to find related data and research on the Internet, there are not too much of them except from the fashion industry. Furthermore, the data is usually:

  • Single sourced — a single fashion designer or company “forecasting” the trend of new colour for next Spring. It is not a general choice of many many people.
  • Context dependent — in this case only for fashion, but not for general purpose.
  • Country/culture specific — usually a preference from western world, but not many other countries.

I want to do a tiny research to find the answer of this question: What Colour Would You Choose to Associate with the Four Seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. I want to gather the data from people all over the world and discover such patterns. My Hypothesis is that, despite of personal preference, people from different countries should have different general patterns related to their geographical location, weather, culture, custom, history, and so on. I hope that at the end of the research I will be able to publish the data, and allow designers of all sorts to use more suitable colour for specific target audiences.

Stay tuned to future posts with the tag “season colour“.

[2] photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/xerones/141357725/

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Banana Vending Machine

By Calvin C | Published: July 24, 2010

I found the first banana vending machine in Japan at Shibuya. Operating by Dole, it offers a bunch of banana for ¥390, or one piece for ¥130. It seems that this machine is just the very first version, where the mechanical design is still not perfect and easy to get stuck. Or perhaps that is a feature to make banana split? I will check this machine out again later and try to record a video of it in operation.

It will be pretty awesome to see this thing in major train stations. City people are rarely having enough fruit for a healthy and balance diet, so in my opinion the Japanese government should sponsor to set up more such fruit vending machines, as well as subsidize the cost and make it more affordable. It is preventive health care: if the citizens eat more healthily, the national health care cost should be reduced, right? Just a thought.

If you are also interested in checking out this machine, you can find it in B2F 一勧銀共同ビル, Shibuya.

Address:
〒150-0042
東京都渋谷区宇田川町２３−３ 渋谷第一勧銀共同ビル

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