Paper Robots and the Future Of Advertising

It’s time for the 5th PingMag Podcast - an edited version of the in-house design seminars we hold once a month. This month we are joined by Aoki Katsunori - Art Director of advertising firm Butterfly Stroke. You can hear Aoki-san’s thoughts on character work in the advertising industry, paper robots and much more by downloading the free podcast (instructions at the end of the article). The podcast comes complete with visuals and English commentary.

Psst! Starting with this month’s seminar, we are doing things a little differently and turning the seminars into a free public event that anyone can come along and enjoy. Despite the rain outside we had a good turnout of IMG SRC staff and PingMag readers and we hope any of you in Tokyo with an interest in design will join us next time - we’ll let you know when in the “announcements” area up top.

Written by Jon
Translated by Chiemi

To begin with, Aoki-san talked about his latest work for Japanese baseball team, the Tokyo Yomiuri GIANTS. The brief was to create a new logo mark encapsulating the theme of the GIANTS. The new logo’s distinguishing feature is the larger-than-life center character, holding objects that represent the 3 main mantras of baseball - run, attack, defend.

This new logo is currently being used in GIANTS’ night games.

Characters for a Coca Cola campaign

Aoki also showed us some of last year’s work for Coca Cola, in which Butterfly Stroke created a set of characters that would be used across many different types of campaign media, including toys and products to give away as prizes.

Aoki Katsunori: Before, I would pretty much do any design work that came my way, but about 3 or 4 years ago I really started to think properly about the kind of work I wanted to do. I started thinking about products and goods, so bit by bit I’ve been moving away from traditional graphic work and more towards character design.

Aoki-san then showed us the Butterfly Stroke website, which seemed to be a treasure-trove of wild and wacky design ideas…

First up in the showcase was Tokyo Kaniko, a character designed by Abe Tamio who also designed characters in a similar vein for Tohato’s mobi series and the Nikkei’s Nikkei Navi. The characters’ signature feature is that they all have strange, seemingly-out-of-place objects resting on their head.

The interesting thing about these characters is that instead of the traditional client/designer relationship where a designer creates a character especially to fit the clients’ needs, these characters form a kind of character library that clients can pick and choose from, and Butterly Stroke grants a license accordingly. This kind of character licensing is in industry terms quite a new approach for an agency like Butterfly Stroke.

Next is KAMI ROBO (paper robots). Kyoto-ite Yasui Tomohiro is the humble creator of this strange but highly endearing phenomenon in which toy robots are made out of simple paper kits. The paper’s flexibility allows for more “lifelike” movement and Tomohiro-san’s mild obsession with the creation of these robots has allowed for some 200 individual designs in the world he has created for them - KAMI ROBO Pro Wrestling!

What originally started as a 1-player game for Tomohiro-san has now, thanks to Butterfly Stroke’s help, expanded into something of a mini-empire including live performances, popularity rankings, novelty erasers, dvds and art exhibitions!

Each of the KAMI ROBO wrestlers has a unique back-story. In addition, there is a pub run by an old, retired KAMI ROBO wrestler where they can go to drink and get advice…

In fact, the set designer of award-winning Japanese film “Always: Sunset on Third Street” is going to make this KAMI ROBO pub “human-scale”. Planned for November, this pub will be made into a performance exhibit at an undecided Tokyo location, where visitors will be able to drink and get up-close to the KAMI ROBO performance!

Finally, Aoki-san introduced Nijizou (Rainbow Elephant). Nijizou is a fantasy character - neither child nor adult, Nijizou is meant to instill a sense of happiness and uplift hearts.

Making a great end to what was already a great seminar, Aoki-san gave every member of the audience a goodie-bag stuffed full of KAMI ROBO-related goods!

Aoki-san - thanks for such a wonderful seminar and the unexpected presents!

If you want to see more of his stuff, visit butterfly stroke’s web site!

To hear Aoki’s thoughts in more detail, please download the PingMag podcast by clicking one of the buttons below.

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