Kazunari Hattori and his cats

The Japanese graphic designer Kazunari Hattori, between 2008 and 2011, art-directed a series of highly-schematised cats for the cover of the free magazine Heibonsha Monthly Encyclopaedia. The designer was given carte blanche to do what he liked with the cover. The only limitation was that only two colours could be used each time. Hattori chose cats almost arbitrarily, interested in seeing how far he could take the graphical sign “cat” before it became visually incoherent. Visual signs for “cat” include pointed ears, whiskers, teeth, claws, a curling tail, a trashbin fish skeleton, and a ball of wool. These were not drawn from life (if they had been more observational, perhaps Hattori would have included the ubiquitous PET bottle full of water which lines the streets wherever cats are to be found in Japan), but extrapolated from stereotypes. Hattori’s cats come completely from stereotypes, yet are not stereotypical themselves. This is because he keeps pushing the graphical figure into areas of semi-abstraction. Hattori’s thing as a designer is to take graphical conventions like cross-hatching and halftone and increase them in size until they start to lose their usual functions. The cats’ bodies, for instance, are not cross-hatched in the usual way — to lend tone and the illusion of depth — but simply barred with diagonal stripes.   http://alessandroniccolaisjourney.tumblr.com/