Cute Advent Calendar

click to enlarge

Regular posting, with new articles and musings, will resume on the new year! Sorry for the radio silence and sporadic updates these past months, but I'm going to get back on board.

May you all have a safe, happy and adorable holiday season.

Adorable Inglourious Basterds

Click to enlarge

An experiment in making something not cute (or shouldn't be cute), cute.

Also viewable at my Flickr.

This and Ponyo are my favorite movies to have come out this year, whut.

Assuaging Privacy Fears with Cute

Above is a video created for Google Maps in Japan. It depicts a man with a security camera for a head, going about the daily business of snapping photos of streets and scanning them into a computer for the street view of Google Maps.

The street view function on Google Maps in Japan has received a lot of criticism about invasion of privacy- showing people's faces, mailbox address, license plate numbers, etc. The character in the video is shown erasing this troubling information from the photos, and updating older photos once complaints are received- all in a cute, fun and friendly way.

Car "Faces": Cute vs. Angry

Some employment promotion first: I am currently available for any freelance design writing (anywhere), or graphic design work (Boston area). I work hard and don't complain, and I'm comfortable with tight deadlines. If interested, please send an e-mail to design.benign at gmail.

Writing Samples: Cuteness and Green Design for a Brighter, Cuter Future / A Letter to President-Elect Obama from a Young Designer

Graphic Design Portfolio: link

Now, onto the post!




An interesting post on Boing Boing about how cars are designed to have "angry" faces, i.e. the headlights and grill on the front of the vehicle are arranged to appear intimidating.

A famous exception to this trend is the Volkswagen Beetle, which I've mentioned before has similar proportions to a baby's face: a high forehead, low-set eyes and mouth, and lots of soft, fat curves.

Cute for Crystals

Sorry for the radio silence. I've been busy at my job, and currently searching for a new job. If anyone is looking for a designer/design writer in the Boston area, send an e-mail my way!

Now onto some new cute news...

Following Louis Vuitton's example, Swarovski recently commissioned an animated piece featuring cute cats to promote their latest crystal collection.

House of Cats from Courtland Lomax on Vimeo.

I am looking forward to more cute + high fashion collaborations.

Photos from Anime Boston 2009

Some pictures of my presentation, "Kawaii Culture: Cuteness in Japan." It was a very fun panel. I even had a full room!







There may also be video footage of this presentation uploaded to Youtube soon. I will post links when that happens.

Breaking News: Cuteness Can Help Your Hand-Eye Coordination

"The secret to better performance: kittens" (Scroll down to the last article on the page.)

"A study at the University of Virginia suggests that experiencing cuteness can actually change how we behave. Students who watched a slideshow with pictures of puppies and kittens scored higher in the board game "Operation" - which requires manual precision - than students who watched a slideshow with pictures of mature cats and dogs."

Photos from my presentation at Anime Boston are coming. And thank you to the young woman who attended who pointed out this study to me.

Design Benign at Anime Boston, May 22-24

Three days until Anime Boston! Just a reminder that I will presenting two panels at the convention, which takes place May 22-24 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, MA.



Friday, May 22 at 6:00pm in Panel Room 207
Kawaii Culture: Cuteness in Japan
A presentation on Japan's favorite cute mascots - from Hello Kitty to "Pipo-kun" - and why cuteness is so prevalent in Japanese culture.

Friday, May 22 at 8:00pm in the Constitution Ballroom, Sheraton Hotel
Akiba Empire: The Otaku Influence
Presented with Alex Leavitt, a discussion on how anime and manga fans in Japan have influenced that country's economics, politics and mainstream culture, and what this could mean for worldwide anime fans. But mostly I'm going to talk about moe rice, Vocaloid and K-On.

If you're planning on going, please come by and say hi!

"Hating you makes me all warm inside." - Happy Bunny

Image from Kawaii Not

Japanese cute has crashed onto American shores like a tsunami. Target and Wal-Mart are filling up with Hello Kitty and Domo-kun merchandise. The Japanese cute pop aesthetic is inspiring many American artists, who put their own dark twist on the innocent, childlike aesthetic.

As popular as cute characters like Bob the Builder and Elmo are in the United States, there seems to be an underlying distrust of cuteness in American culture. Cuteness, associated with childhood, carries connotations of helplessness and neediness, undesirable traits in America's individualistic, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps culture. Japan's collectivist mentality fosters interdependency, having a greater tolerance for childish helplessness (called "amae").

Thus, when Japanese cuteness is adopted into American culture for consumption by teenagers and young adults, it's given an ironic twist. Characters like Happy Bunny and the Kawaii Not series demonstrate this trend: cute smiling, seemingly-innocuous characters spouting expletives and malice, giving an adult-like wink behind their childlike facade. Web sites like Hello Kitty Hell seek - in a tongue-in-cheek way - to expose the darker side of Japan's favorite commercial character. Violent cute characters like Gloomy Bear do exist in Japan, but they're in the minority of the greater Cute Commercial Complex.

"Cuteness and Green Design for a Brighter, Cuter Future" on Design Taxi

My article "Cuteness and Green Design for a Brighter, Cuter Future", originally written for Speak Up, is now also published on Design Taxi.

Acceptance and Rebellion: The Two Faces of Cute in Japan

One of the central themes in my lecture "Kawaii Culture: Cuteness in Japan" is the polarity of cuteness in contemporary Japanese culture. On one end, cute mascots prance around the military, major corporations and the police force. On the other end, young people utilize cuteness as a way to stave off entry into the adult world.

Childish mascots give an endearing, welcoming face to the stressful, rule-filled, work-a-day nature of modern Japanese life. They adorn the logos of corporations where salarymen spend the majority of the day at their desks. These characters represent the ideal characteristics of the modern worker: loyalty, working hard, and deference to authority. They fit perfectly into the obsession with "saving face", always acting polite and courteous, and willing to do what's best for the group.

But young people in Japan are increasingly resisting this way of life. They see the stress on their fathers' faces coming home late after working all day at a job they hate (followed by drinks with the boss), and don't want that to be them in 20 years. Rather than be chained to their parents' expectations, and with the Japanese economy in a decade-long recession (meaning lifetime employment at a company is no longer the norm), they want to follow their own pursuits. With the age of marriage in Japan rising (as well as the number of people just not marrying at all), and the plummeting birthrate, this individualistic zeitgeist is taking hold- and their flag of rebellion is cuteness. Teens and young, unmarried women adopt signifiers of cuteness and childhood - reading children's manga, wearing "childish" fashion styles and carrying Hello Kitty-bedecked cellphones, indulging in cakes and creamy pastries - as a way to proclaim, "I am not mature enough for the adult world."

Childhood, rather than adolescence, is viewed as the time for freedom. As movies like Freaky Friday and 17 Again demonstrate, in Western culture adolescence is the desired time to return to in one's life: one begins to gain independence from their parents, can earn a drivers license, take on a part time job. In Japan, as a child enters secondary education, the responsibilities of homework, cram school, entrance exams and preparing for the future take hold and can be crushing.

In Western culture, to rebel during adolescence is to act more adult: drink, smoke, stay out late at night, become sexually active, watch movies with swear words in them. For many young people in Japan, to rebel is to revert back to childhood, purposely remove oneself from the adult world and the responsibilities and obligations that come with it.

Further Reading
Cuties in Japan by Sharon Kinsella
Cute Inc. by Mary Roach at Wired.com
Inside Look at Japanese Cute Culture by Diana Lee

Experiments in Cute: Tweenbots

[Tweenbots], proof that even hurried, pushy New Yorkers are weak in the face of teh kwoot.

Check out that video!

We're All Pink Inside (Our Pants)

Jockey has reportedly seen a [boon in sales of pink underwear for men] (Note: Article has not-so-safe-for-work images) over the last six months. They attribute the rising popularity in colorful briefs to the sinking economy, and the need for men to privately cheer themselves up as their futures look grim. Apparently, in times of crisis, women purchase more lipstick, and men turn to flamboyant undies- Who knew?

I have noticed a trend in men wearing more pink lately. I obviously can not attest to what they wear under their clothes, but I have seen more pink dress shirts and ties out and about.

Cuties Take Over

A fun post from Print magazine editor Steven Heller on the trend of naming foods and other consumer goods "Cuties", and the confusion it can lead to: [link]

Lecture Nibbles: Western Characters vs. Japanese Characters

One of the things I will be discussing at my lecture "Kawaii Culture: Cuteness in Japan" is the difference in design between the majority of Western cartoon characters and the majority of Japanese cartoon characters.

As the chart above shows, while both sets of mascots are cute, Japanese characters tend to have more infantile characteristics (bigger heads, rounder bodies), as well as characteristics that make them appear more helpless (lack of mouths, stubby limbs, lack of fingers). Even Western characters geared towards young children tend to be more "adolescent" in their designs: articulated limbs, lots of movement, loud/verbose.

As noted above, this affects how the character interacts with its audience- Japanese characters tend to more about the viewer projecting their emotions and desires onto the character; it's the opposite with Western characters. The creators of Hello Kitty have said [similar comments] when asked about Hello Kitty's lack of a mouth: "Hello Kitty speaks from her heart."

Ada Lovelace Day 2009: Susan Kare

[Ada Lovelace Day] is a worldwide blogging event to celebrate the contributions women have made to technology.

Talking about women and technology on a blog devoted to cute things, it's only natural that my post be about computer interface graphic designer Susan Kare.

Remember MS-DOS, a black screen on which you had to input white lines of text to run programs? That was in the days before graphic computer interfaces. Then the Apple Macintosh's classic Mac OS came along and changed all of that, making computers easier to use by replacing command lines with cute, clickable icons.

Those early examples of pixel art were designed by Susan Kare: the "Happy Mac" icon, the Chicago screen typeface, the command symbol, and many of the tool icons still seen in graphics programs such as Photoshop. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College and New York University, Kare worked at Apple as a Creative Director from 1982 to 1985. She went on to do work for other computer companies such as NeXT, IBM and Microsoft (where she designed the graphics for Window 3.0's solitaire game). Currently she is helping to develop the Chumby computer, and has done some icon work for Facebook.

Apple's reputation for cute, nonthreatening computers owes a lot to her pioneering graphic work, and that's why she's my pick for Ada Lovelace Day.

[Susan Kare's Portfolio Site]
[Wiki entry]
[Interview with Susan Kare]

Lecture Nibbles: Japan's Cute Ambassadors

Up to the time of AnimeBoston, I will be posting little details and links of topics I will be discussing at my lecture "Kawaii Culture: Cuteness in Japan."

While they already have Hello Kitty as a tourism ambassador to China and Taiwan, [Japan has picked a new trio of cute young woman] to act as its cultural ambassadors at Paris' Japan Expo in July.

Touchy-Feely 2.0

The Twitter bird and the Fail Whale. The cheery blue Livejournal pencil. Even the Blogger "B" icon is kinda cute. These friendly logos are like a beacon of light in the vast, tangled jungle of the Internet, signaling where users can sit down and relax in their little online homes.

A quick survey on social networking and blogging site logos reveals several popular themes: rounded corners, simplified human forms, and blue. Lots and lots of calming blue. Air-y and cute, they're a perfect compliment to posts about your pet cat and recent trip to the sushi restaurant.

The names of many of these sites are cute, too. "Twitter" pulls up images of a sparrow chirping merrily. Others like Facebook and Myspace emphasis the personal nature of profile pages, literally transporting your real life into html and CSS code.

But as social networking sites move from the personal to the professional and political, will these cute icons and names suffice? Or will their novel nature be dropped as twittering and uploading photos to Flickr become a common fact of life?

Off Topic: Sita Sings the Blues

Something not cute- or anime-related on this blog, but important nonetheless. Everyone reading this, go [here] and watch this wonderful animated film.

DO IT NOW OR YOU WILL REGRET IT

A new post with actual content coming tomorrow, I promise.

Video- "The Science of Cute"

From Popular Science, a charming little video about the "science of cute"- probably basic stuff to readers of this blog, but a good watch nonetheless.

Via [Cute Overload].