Platinum A' Design Award Winner 2020
Bold geometric letterforms functioning as both linguistic signifiers and architectural elements encode a sophisticated meditation on the relationship between typography, time, and three-dimensional space within Katsumi Tamura's calendar design. The transformation of flat paper into self-supporting sculptural forms through folding activates longstanding associations between paper manipulation and the revelation of hidden potential, the origami tradition's philosophy of discovering form inherent within material. Month abbreviations rendered as die-cut apertures rather than printed surfaces invert conventional figure-ground relationships, making absence rather than presence the carrier of meaning, suggesting that time itself might be understood as shaped by the spaces between moments rather than the moments themselves. The chromatic assignments likely follow intuitive seasonal associations: warm orange-red for March evokes early spring energy and renewal, chartreuse yellow for April suggests the fresh growth of mid-spring, emerald green for October may reference the lingering verdancy before autumn's transformation, while magenta for August captures the full-bloom intensity of late summer. The tetradic color harmony creates a sense of completeness and cyclical return appropriate to the calendar's function of marking recurring temporal patterns. The geometric sans-serif typography, with its modernist heritage, encodes values of clarity, rationality, and democratic accessibility associated with twentieth-century design reform movements that sought to create universal visual languages transcending cultural boundaries. The tent-fold structure creates a miniature architectural presence, each month becoming a small monument occupying desktop space with purposeful gravity. The calendar grid's diminutive scale relative to the bold letterforms establishes clear hierarchy between experiential time-marking and abstract temporal measurement, perhaps suggesting that lived experience should take precedence over mere enumeration of passing days.
Typeface is a calendar designed around the concept of the typeface. The set contains four sheets, consisting of the months from January to December, punched out in an original typeface. You can assemble the sheets into calendar units that each display three months of the year. Quality designs have the power to modify space and transform the minds of its users. They offer comfort of seeing, holding and using. They are imbued with lightness and an element of surprise, enriching space.