Anime!

I'd never thought about anime from the designer's point-of-view.

If you’ve browsed through my links list, a few of them might seem out of place (and maybe a few are). One such link is “anime news“. I’ve referred to it only once before because, while interesting, I still consider anime’s impact on industrial design to be rather low-level. However, as manufacturing and design increasingly head to Asian suppliers in the same countries where Japanese animation has been off-shored, anime’s influence on product design could grow significantly; and I mean in the sense beyond the obvious Japanimation spin-off toys (eg Pokemon, Dragonball Z, Sailor Moon, etc). One example of how this kind of influence can be transferred is this computer mouse design created by Masamune Shiro, creator of the hugely popular Ghost in the Shell. As technology liberates designers from the tyranny of manufacturing constraints, this kind of crossover can only increase; more and more artists can move beyond images into tangible, manufacturable items.