The City Reporter

Yesterday I arrived home after the two frenetic weeks collecting material for the Tokyo Walks app. Haven’t have the time to look at everything yet but one thing is sure, there is a lot to do:

· Draw the portraits of all the hosts (almost done).
· Draw the 6 opening illustrations (half way there).
· Draw the 60 61 (!) spots.
· Write all texts.
· Edit and clean all the sounds.
· Ask all hosts to double check all the spots.
· Have everything readproof by Angela.
· Code everything into the app with XML.

For now, I am busy getting rid of the jetlag.

Normally, a trip to Japan means me buying loads of stuff; mostly books and drawing materials. Sometimes, very rarely, one or two of these things will change something in my life, in a minor or mayor way. The discovery of Yasuhiko Kobayashi’s work and that of Kappa Senoh on my first trip were two of them. Fortunately I was able to find other 3 pieces of art I would like to share with you.
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Images are important in the Japanese culture, as in any oriental culture. I am not an expert on the why, but you can see we in the west use more text only to communicate, while as oriental cultures will reccur to images instead. In Japan, they master this as no other country. I can even recall the time a Japanese wrote draw for me a shopping list: an eggplant, two eggs…

While waiting for my friend Patrick coming from Narita, I drew these people on a billboard. I love the over the top personality they add to film characters in Japan. I guess a little from kabuki theatre and manga, this exaggeration is something omnipresent in japanese visual culture.

Although (or maybe because) I did the Tokyo Walks in August 2011, by the end of the year the information didn’t feel accurate so I decided to revisit everything or at least the most keen to change places. Also, the need to record sounds for the app makes redoing everything unavoidable.

These hand drawn maps are common view in Tokyo streets (I guess in the rest of Japan as well). They show the neighbourhood and often the names of the people living in the houses and the names of the businesses are in it. They are often beautiful and pretty useful, as streets have no names in Japan, when you are trying to find something.

Tokyo being probably the last place you will expect to find a mosque, there is of course up to sixteen but this one is noteworthy. Beautifully made, it’s an incredible place. Only by its openness (you can just walk from the streets, the door is open) and situation (heart of the residential Yoyogi Uehara), this building is a surprise.
See more of the inside in this video.

I am back in the town where all the City Reports started. This time to collect more material for the upcoming TOKYO WALKS iPad app.

Having been here for a couple of times already doesn’t erase the magic of the place. Visibly  touched by the Big Tohoku earthquake of 2011, the city remains a vibrant, beautiful lady always smiling with to her visitors. I will be posting a little everyday.

In the last months, we have been working hard on the upcoming City Reporter App for iPad.

It will be a WALKS app, which means it’s not strictly going to be 100% a city report but more a collection of walks through the city. The app is going to be mainly inspirational but also useful if you’d take the iPad with you to the walks: you can read it all when at home before visiting Tokyo and get dreaming about being there but the map view will guide you easily through the place. To help with the inspiration part, each walk has its own soundtrack with sounds from the places described.

The app design and development is in the hands of Cathy Shive and I have done the interface and the contents. I will be posting here more about the making of it.

After a 3 month stay in Tokyo, the Amsterdam denim shop Tenue de Nîmes asked me to make a selection of the city‘s best spots for their Journal de Nîmes. Some time later came Paris and so The City Reporter was born. So far there are reports of London, Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Tokyo and New York.

The City Reports are meant to give a personal view on the cities and bring the best on them to those who want to get a deep feeling of the place. The series have been a big success and has seen several spin-offs for clients of my design studio GOOD Inc. At the moment we are working on the first digital edition, which is a collection of Walks through Tokyo and will be available as an iPad app in March 2012.

Open to new cities and proposals, if you are a publication or a publishing company I look forward hearing from you at helloATluismendoDOTcom

To see more City Reports and pictures please go to LuisMendo.com website.

The city reporter wouldn’t be possible without these people:
Angela Shetler for the great proofreading and making it all understandable.
Joachim Baan and Tenue de Nîmes people for offering me the chance.
Jason Morse for his kind endorsing.
And so many others that helped along the way. Gracias.