How this Japanese studio transformed a 2D poster into an emotive feat of 3D graphic design

For the Tokyo-based studio Goo Choki Par, founded by graphic designers Q Asaba, Kent Iitaka and Rei Ishii, good graphic design is about intuition and emotion-led expression and communication. “Our primary impulse in our creative process is to pursue what words cannot convey, emotions that cannot be expressed through language, as well as visual pleasure,” Iitaka tells D&AD.

Goo Choki Par’s style is geometric, hypnotic and frequently imbued with a joyous kinetic energy. The trio combines digital and analogue techniques in the realisation of their innovative projects, which have included everything from conjuring up jazz-inspired patterns for an Issey Miyake collection to producing the first dedicated Paralympics posters for the Tokyo 2020 games.

Posters are a particular strong suit of the studio, as evidenced by its Graphite Pencil-awarded project Masquerader: a series of five posters each depicting a different mask. Produced for Graphic Trial — a 2022 exhibition organised by the printing company Toppan to explore the possibilities of printed expression — Masquerader saw the designers employ a pioneering printing technique called Wax Plus to render the paper on which the masks were printed transparent. As such, different graphics printed on the back and front of the individual poster sheets were able to function in dialogue with one another, expanding the monochrome designs from 2D to 3D — with evocative results. Here, the studio talks us through the creation of its masks, and shares its tips for achieving expressive and emotional design.

In spite of what they dub “an appreciation for logical and functional design expression”, Asaba, Iitaka and Ishii say they place a great deal of importance on “staying intuitively excited” during their design process. For them, graphic design is about going beyond language and cohesive thinking and instead tapping into “something that more directly shakes our primitive sense organs” — an approach that has resulted in their distinctive, singular style.

Seeking to innovate within your chosen field is all very well, but too often it requires a bigger budget than the one available to you. As such, Goo Choki Par jumped at the chance to work with Toppan, Japan’s largest printing company, which has a long history of collaborating with graphic designers. “We had high expectations that we would be able to challenge ourselves by employing any kind of printing technique we wanted — all those we don’t usually have access to,” Ishii explains. “And the best thing about the project was that we didn't have to worry about the printing budget.”

Thanks to the endless influx of new digital technologies, and the fact that digital commissions increasingly outweigh print ones, it’s easy to forget how rewarding analogue design can be. In this context, Asaba says, it was particularly exciting for the studio to “reevaluate the attraction of posters once again and rediscover their possibilities”. These include the fact that “paper, which absorbs a lot of ink and exists physically in a room, stimulates not only our sense of sight, but also of touch and smell”, as well as the democratic potential of a work that can be mass-produced.

For Masquerader, the designers zoomed in on how posters inhabit space, and looked to maximise their materiality in bold new ways. “We challenged ourselves to create a three-dimensional poster expression in which the graphics would also exist in the space between the front and back of the paper, which is only a few microns,” Iitaka explains. They landed upon the mask theme shortly thereafter, realising that the dynamic potential of the Wax Plus printing technique would lend itself perfectly to portraying the ever-shifting nature of the human face. “The aim was to use it to express the various emotions stirring in the depths of human expression, which are not well understood on a mere surface level,” Iitaka says.

The creation of the posters’ graphics meant designing from a 360-degree viewpoint: a whole new challenge for the studio. “In our usual production process, we only consider the view from one aspect but for this project, the graphics on the front and back sides of the posters had an influence on one another,” Ishii expands. Because of this, arriving at the final five designs for the masks was a decidedly fiddly process that involved “repeatedly creating as many simulations as we could envision on a PC” before trialling the differing effects in print.

Arriving at the final posters required energy and experimentation in abundance — especially when it came to finding the most suitable paper to print with. “That was the hardest part because the effect and texture of the transparent wax varied greatly in appearance depending on the type of paper used,” Asaba says. “Some kinds of paper had blotches that spread like oil stains when the wax was applied, while others had poor ink retention.” They finally found the perfect match, but not before much time and money had been spent — “special processing requires a lot of both.”

Masquerader is an encapsulation of the power of emotional design: there’s something almost Rorschach-test-like about the abstracted, deeply expressive faces that invites us to interpret them through the associations and feelings they generate. This is very much intentional, and a key part of the team’s design philosophy. “We believe that emotions are limitless,” the designers conclude. “We all have different personalities, nationalities, languages, gender identities and cultures, and it gives us great pleasure to be able to transcend all of our differences through visual communication. To empathise with each other through sight and our other senses. To share emotions without words. If we can create something that brings joy to someone, no matter how big or trivial, that is our greatest happiness.”