How playful design can build serious brands

To be sure, Ogaki, who recently featured in Campaign Asia-Pacific’s 40 under 40, is an unusual case. Few people decide on a career of any sort before their late teens, but she has technically been a designer since the age of 12. It was 23 years ago that she entered and won a contest held by the airline ANA to decorate one of its planes.

Ogaki’s ‘Marine Jumbo’—a Boeing 747 decked out as a colourful whale, complete with a water spout—subsequently flew all over Japan, and made her name to the extent that her business card still bears an image of it. The acclaim that the ‘Jumbo’ received also made her realise that design could be a gateway to bigger things.

“I love fishing,” she said. “Sometimes the fish I pull out of the water have incredibly unique designs, and this is an inspiration for my work as well.”

Ogaki's early 'Marine Jumbo' for ANA

But she also began applying her interests and energy to brands, continuing her relationship with ANA with the design of a hot air balloon, for example, and developing the imagery for tourism campaigns around the country. It was the desire to combine design and stories, as with her books, and expose that to a wider audience, that led her to the advertising industry.

In working for brands at ADK, Ogaki has managed to retain her own distinctive style, which is characterised by playfulness. A recent piece of work for a contact lens company, Menicon, features a kappa, a river-dwelling creature in Japanese folklore. Kappa traditionally have a saucer-shaped patch on the top of their heads that must be kept hydrated at all times in order for them to live. Moving a step further, Ogaki’s character, named Melsuke (pictured at the top of this article), throws Menicon contact lenses to people with dry contact lenses. It’s also yellow rather than the traditional green, she explained, “because it needed to have a more hygienic feel. Green might make people think of slime in riverbanks—I didn’t want people to think it came from polluted water”.

Ogaki is one of Campaign's '40 under 40' for 2015

“A contact lens package plan can be complicated to explain in an ad—that's why I decided to have a character with a story behind it,” Ogaki explained. “Melsuke’s hobby is to help people. If you lose your contacts, he’ll help; or with age your contacts may not fit: he’ll help there too. Whatever the situation is. The idea is to put all these difficult medical things into a fun context.”

Ogaki admits that Japan is saturated with corporate characters, but puts that down to the culture being “very visually oriented”. As with medical products, cities and have many complex factors that need to be edited into something visually appealing, simple and memorable, hence the multitude of cute (or sometimes not so cute) mascots representing destinations around Japan.

“If people enjoy a design and the story behind a product, it can help the product expand,” she noted. “A design should be something where you can immediately recognise the story behind it, so I always aim for symbolisation of the story, for a design that can encapsulate the story.”

With regard to characters or mascots, “it’s really about what you want to convey through a character,” she said. “How you can use it to have people come to an event, for example. It’s really necessary to have the character perform a function. It can’t just exist as a symbol per se. What I design is very conceptual and based on an objective rather than just a character.”

For S&B Foods, a large Japanese seasoning company, for example, Ogaki developed “spice and herb brothers” as a means of educating children about spices. These were brought to life on a website. “Many people think spices are difficult, but if you become familiar with them as a child it doesn’t seem so complicated,” she said.

At the same time, as a children’s book author, Ogaki has seen demand from brands for characters she created purely for stories. In one example, the retail chain Aeon approached her firstly to develop a textile featuring a flower design she created for a book. The company now sells a range of her designs in its stores in various formats. It has also invited her to conduct in-store workshops for children that involved designing their own characters.

Ultimately, Ogaki sees the business of advertising moving closer to product design. “Although I work in an agency, I do a lot of work that is not just ads. [Aeon] was looking to put art into everyday lives. The significance of the project was to make design from art and to create something that can be used in everyday life.”

Textile designs for Aeon based on Ogaki's storybook illustrations