mount inc. in 2024

For the stop-motion video, I added the missing margins to the sequential frames and, mindful of PC and smartphone display and subtly wavering positions, prepared hundreds of them, exporting them night after night.

Sun-Ad’s Namima-san wrote the copy that symbolizes Shupatto. It stays with me that during the proposal, the client listened with tears in their eyes.

The shoot took place one day in February with snow still lingering, at Takagi-san’s home-cum-studio. Wrapped in a coat with a dry-landscape-garden motif she’d photographed herself, Takagi-san offered a prayer to the mountain cherry blossoms. The team at discovery go inc wove that breathtakingly pure, beautiful moment into a single story.

Takagi-san’s cherry blossoms rendered in a monochrome world.
While making their distinctive beauty stand out, so viewers could feel the world view,
I was particular about the shade of gray used in the background and the density of the text.

My first job after joining! As an inexperienced web designer, I never imagined I’d be involved all the way to implementation. I felt anxious, but I coded while looking at sites of past exhibitions. It was a truly valuable experience, and I felt the accomplishment and fulfillment of seeing it through to the end.

With a request to play the venue’s BGM on the site too, the first-ever page with sound was born on the GYRE ART pages!
Drawing inspiration from GOMA-san’s music and works, I made the SOUND button together with designer Tai. On the implementation side, I struggled quite a bit with Lottie and handling sound for the first time.

Since the exhibition centered on “dialogue,” I wanted to more memorably convey the feelings toward Beuys packed into every single word spoken by the six artists, so I made quirky typography using dots.
Combined with a different layout for each person, I aimed for a site that conveys the fun sensation of turning the pages of a magazine.

It was a culmination-of-masking-craft site. I repeated dot generation and implementation testing more times than I can count, scrapped a huge number of dots, and felt relieved when I finally met the ideal dots. Pursuing the pleasantness of the motion in the lettering was a point I personally obsessed over.

A project we took on with a team of nearly 60 — the largest project I’ve led as project leader, and I feel like I saw a new landscape. Incidentally, the main production period for the site was 2023; 2024 was the year I ran around shooting to completely replace the site’s photos. We’re all pushing forward, ongoing, toward next year’s launch. We’ll report when it’s updated, so please do take a look.

I feel like I was working on it nonstop around this time last year — though even that is no longer certain.

Based on a direction document compiling what we wanted to convey visually, the world view, the constraints of expression, storyboards, and so on, I talked with Oka-san, who handled the motion graphics, and, checking against the initial image, gave detailed feedback and layered on tuning.
To raise the quality, we kept up an earthy back-and-forth.

Gotoschool’s “turning common sense on its head” perspective… In a business of dealing with people, it looks at each person’s potential carefully, cheerfully, joyfully, and straightforwardly.
Because of that, summing up GTS-ness in words was hard, and I struggled with all of the copy.

Isn’t it an astonishing — and menacing — turn of events that we ended up adding sound a few days before delivery? But thanks in part to Hayashi-san’s skill at making sound, viewing it with sound gives incredible immersion and depth, so sound really is a great thing.

The sheer speed of finishing not only design and implementation but copywriting, model auditions, shooting, and sound-making in a single month. It’s a site we reached after the team agonized over how to output the balance between PLST’s conservative impression and the exhilaration of the web.

The edges of every image undulate as if embodying AYANA’s wind and waves. Considering performance, how to create that “AYANA-ness” using only CSS without WebGL — pale-faced, I labored over DOM performance tuning together with Suta.

I recall how, at every phase, there was so much to manage — both people and materials. Since it was an overseas client, I was bewildered every day by communication mixing Japanese and English, but in the end I drew immense energy from those conversations.

By taking Shibuya’s “chaos” as the concept, infinite possibilities opened up. That it settled into that final form was thanks to the process and influence of discussing it with these members — if even one member had been different, I think the output would have changed greatly.

The jangly movement of a huge number of images switching was envisioned from the early stages, and I layered on tuning of the switching timing, duration, and randomness. It reached its current motion thanks to a torrent of feedback from Hayashi-san and, when I hit a wall, advice from Umetsu-san and Okabe-san.

So swapping out a development environment can be done in a fairly short time after all, Maboroshi-san.

Maboroshi handled the front-end and system development. We needed to make use of the old and make it newly easy to use. Apparently they used AI to replace the old parts.

The “forest” we drew three years ago grew many times larger and was drawn again. It didn’t just get bigger — the resolution of various elements like the soil, roots, and seeds increased, logically explaining the mechanism for nurturing a rich forest.

I had the image of them as the quintessential Japanese stationery company, but their actual scope of activity is simply vast, and the height of their future goals far exceeded my imagination!

From the start of the video planning, we’d been watching photographer Koichiro Doi’s footage and saying “it’d be great to shoot something like this” — and then, unbelievably, we got to work with the man himself..

This exhibition’s theme was “sacred geometry” — a term unfamiliar to many, I think. I groped for how to make it easier to understand through design. Designing a site’s key visual for the first time, I keenly felt my own immaturity.