Flash Gurus (Pt I) Yugo Nakamura

EXPERIMENTAL GENIUS
Yugo Nakamura

For services to taking interface design and web usability into territories most mortals fear to tread

Places of worship // www.yugop.com // www.ecotonoha.com // www.intentionallies.co.jp // www.uniqlo.com // http://eye.kddi.com

For anyone aware of who Yugo Nakamura is and what he represents, it’s fair to say there was only ever going to be one winner in this category. Probably the best way to introduce him is as the digital design equivalent to Philippe Starck, architect Frank Gehry or fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. What do they all share? Well, in essence it is a desire to redefine the space they inhabit and look at their world in a completely new way. We’ve been aware of Nakamura’s unique brand of interface innovation for years, mostly with admiration for his MONO*crafts website (http://yugop.com/ver2/), the showground for his outlandish efforts. Born in 1970 in Nara, Japan, and currently residing in Tokyo, Nakamura graduated from a Master’s course in Engineering at the University of Tokyo in 1996. He quickly began a professional career in bridge engineering and landscape architecture before taking the first steps into the online domain. “In the ancient Japanese methods of landscaping, there is an old saying. ‘Rather than beautifying one’s own creation, make better the environment that surrounds it; bring into presence the beauty of the place in which it will lay.’ This is what I’d like my design to be”, as Nakamura explained to Creative Review in 2008. “I’d like it to be a kind of filter that lets the interesting parts of the new-media environments, such as the internet, the computer and the people who are involved in these worlds, become more alive and intriguing through my work.” In 2000, he joined web development agency Business Architects as art director before a brief stint as a freelancer lead on to him starting interactive agency Tha Ltd (http://tha.jp/) in 2004. However, it was through his portfolio site at Yugop.com and the ability to showcase personal experiments, projects both commercial and not, that found him fame in the worldwide community. Stuff like NEC’s Ecotonoha conservancy project (www.ecotonoha.com) swept top accolades at the Clio Awards, LIAA, One Show Interactive and Cannes Cyber Lion, while similar industry praise for Yugop.com, Honda Sweet Mission and UNIQLO USA followed. Other noted works included a portfolio site for a Japanese architectural firm, www.intentionallies.co.jp, which used pioneering drag-and-drop Flash mechanics to control a stack of cards.

A Unique Approach

Visitors to his own site will quickly realise that Nakamura’s style can be tough to adjust to in so much as it makes the user work. By abandoning many of the conventions associated with traditional web interaction, he has a fondness for playfulness that isn’t always wholly usable. The site’s main menu zooms three-dimensionally in all directions before you figure out just the right gestures to successfully operate it. Once in, you’ll marvel at some of the key-driven projects, particularly an interactive Mona Lisa that distorts beneath a numeric grid as you press. “I started using Flash back in 1998 when Flash 4 was released, which only allowed poor, primitive programming. But because of that limit, I learned to work around and out of the confines of the program. I think Flash has now become too rich.”

(Originally featured in Web Designer 150, by Mark Billen)

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