three faces of Tatsuo Ebina: In the empire of signs, a designer honors his mentors, The

Graphis, Mar/Apr 2002 by Kaplan, Michael

Japan goes wild for good design. You witness it in the elaborately outrageous clothing of kids who congregate in Tokyo's parks on weekends. It screams from the pages of glossy fashion magazines. Even the meticulously organized elements on platters of food appear to have been art directed. Sharp-looking imagery is so culturally ingrained that the Japanese make limited delineations between advertising shops and design firms. Strong pictures sell products over there, and language takes a backseat to great illustration or photography. Mundane things look stunningly cool-cigarette packs, ice-coffee containers, candy wrappers. At the forefront of Japan's cutting-edge design is Tatsuo Ebina. His self-named Tokyo-based firm specializes in producing highly graphic ads dominated by clever images: one campaign offers flaming hair, eyes and noses; car ads contain black-and-white illustrations in the surreal spirit of Man Ray; a shopping mall promotion centers around a perfectly lit, beautifully contoured bar of soap-with a single, exquisitely curled pubic hair resting in its center. Looking at these pieces one recalls David Byrne as much as David Ogilvy.

One weeknight at around 8:00, Ebina's office is a hub of activity. Ebina himself looks charmingly rakish, with spiky black hair and a fire-engine red golf shirt. He occupies a big-cheese desk in the rear of the sprawling but crowded loft-style room. All around him, Gen X employees brainstorm at conference tables, space out in front of computers, and laser-print fresh concepts. Maintaining a swirl of youthful inspiration is integral to Ebina's constant need for hot ideas. His quest for the newest, the coolest and the wildest reverberates in his library of style magazines while the alternative radio station blasts edgy Japanese rock 'n' roll throughout the office.

The importance of maintaining a young staff is a little trick Ebina picked up from a man named Gan Hosoya, president of Tokyo's majorly successful Like Publicity Co. "I noticed that there were many young designers working there," says Ebina who is a mentor for his youthful employees and acknowledges that there have been three big mentors in his career, Gan being one of them. "It's important, maybe more important than having a sense of continuity. In trying to model my company after Like, I strive to keep the staff young, interested and fresh. I feel that it's worth sacrificing continuity to maintain that vitality. If you have the same designers year in and year out they keep reworking the same ideas all the time. Things can get tired. In a typical Japanese firm, one veteran designer oversees everything and the other designers-who've been there forever-continue with what they have been doing for many years. Young designers may be raw but they always have fresh ideas. And when you continually have new and young people coming in, they bring the kinds of ideas that are influenced by life and by the latest cultural trends rather than by design."

Ebina acknowledges that his approach is insanely labor intensive-the proposed solutions are not sketches, each ad looks completely done, and there are 39 in the first group, 24 in the second, and one final ad-but he sees it as the best way to squeeze out the last drops of creativity, to know that you have exhausted all possibilities and have come up with the best concept. Perhaps this is another holdover from his days with Myata, who had a unique way of making presentations. "Myata would not give the client options," remembers Ebina. "There would be one best ad that he would show. Of course you must go through the process of dismissing all the work that is not top-notch." He hesitates for a beat, then explains that this approach is not without risk. "You need to be very sure about the one ad that you put all your faith into, and if the client doesn't like it, well..." His voice trails off and he shrugs before offering a nervous looking smile.

A self-starter, Ebina graduated from Tokyo Design School in 1983. He worked briefly for Myata, then developed a substantial freelance business. It led him to launch his eponymous shop in 1986. From Satoru Myata, another mentor and the namesake for the above firm, Ebina developed a method for producing graphic-- work that he calls "multi-dimensional design"-so named because it approaches an assignment from many different perspectives-but to me it sounds more like what I'd call a "cluster-bomb approach." He says that it's all about executing design from a broad perspective and working in a spontaneous way to hammer out as many variations on a particular theme as possible. Then he painstakingly narrows down the concepts to a single ad. Aiming to make the point, Ebina thumbs through a monograph of his work. It covers much of Ebina's eclectic career, with pieces that range from a Nissan ad centering around a box of spilled safety-matches to one that features a long line of Santa Clauses waiting for a bus in a Tokyo suburb. But what he really wants to show me is a page that chronicles the development of an ad for Boss Black lager, made by Suntory. At the top of this page is a dizzying variety of ads: one features a fat baby, another has a topless woman, and several focus on the boldly designed black-and-white can. Below that group is a second series, with fewer ads, but, this time, they all focus on the can: cans being gripped, cans blasting off like rockets, several cans that sprout fuses. At the bottom of the page is the finished ad: Boss Black, laid on its side, resembling a horizontal stick of dynamite with a sparked fuse sticking out.