Size Does Matter

Three weeks in Tokyo eating ice cream on the beach, drinking overpriced beer at tiny bars, shooting girls in colorful outfits. The website could wait. My collaborators were busy with their own stuff. Then the rainy season hit and typhoon after typhoon rolled through Honshu, and suddenly I was trapped inside with nothing but time and the relaunch I’d been avoiding for months.

I know from experience that completely redesigning this place always implodes. Remember the black minimalist diary we tried? Or that pseudo-print thing? I loved both of them. Thought they were genuinely brilliant. Everyone else thought I was insane. So now every update is just whatever design ideas I half-found while flipping through Tokyo magazines, applied with whatever confidence I could fake. The homepage is the big one—monumentally oversized, basically just there to prove we have the biggest and you don’t. The background image is gone. English is coming back eventually. Behind the scenes we’re building new sections by stealing from everywhere and repackaging it so it looks like intention.

It’s really just doing more, making life worse for people who actually want to see us fail, and that turns out to be its own reward. Yeah, there are bugs. There’s always bugs. We’re working on them. The homepage might be the worst thing we’ve ever made and also the best, and you should click around and decide which one is true.

Time to go back to Tokyo and eat tendon and sleep and not think about websites for a while.