About this site

ddd DATABASE (ddddb) is a record of the 30 year history of ddd. The site encompasses the posters, photographed images of the exhibitions, related persons, and related events of all exhibitions held at ddd from 1992 to 2022, and was created with the intent of making ddd’s history available to reference for the future of graphic design.

It comes fully furnished with a chronological table of all events in every year so far, allowing users to view all the historical background and connections of all exhibitions. In addition, 12 designers deeply involved in creating exhibitions at ddd were interviewed, and 12 keywords were collected from them to help viewers navigate ddddb. Posters have also been selected in relation to each keyword.

About the ddd archive exhibition

ddddb is a database comprised of two parts; an online and an offline section. In contrast with the online database, which does not offer any indication of sizes, paper thickness, or texture, the offline database at Karasuma is an actual physical database—including 85 selected posters from past exhibitions and all fliers at actual size—for users to physically handle*.
*Some posters are viewable only.

There will be a ‘poster poster’ installation hanging in the venue incorporating 35 different posters.

The PR materials for the event have been made in the same way, following the ‘poster poster’ concept. The top 8.5mm (actual size) of past posters was used to create the B1/B2 Posters, the A4 Flier, and the postcards for ddddb.

Regarding the poster selection

There were two fundamental criteria for the selection of posters. One was that they be selected by the 12 designers who had proposed keywords for the exhibition. Participating designers were asked to then select posters with similar attributes as the keywords extracted from their approach to the creation of the posters they designed themselves (52 posters in total*)

The 24 other posters not mentioned above were selected to offer a balance encompassing all of the past 30 years in the gallery’s history. They were selected on the basis of their digitally irreproducible paper texture and printing processes.
*The poster selected by Satoshi Kondo—Posters from Vienna The Vienna Municipal Library Archive, 1883-2002—will not be exhibited due to its scarcity.

Regarding the keywords

Keywords were chosen after interviews with the following 11 designers. Satoshi Kondo, Nicole Schmid, Shinnoske Sugisaki, Yoshimaru Takahashi, Takuya Tsutsumi, Shigeki Hattori, Yuma Harada, Midori Hirota, Keizo Matsui, Ryu Mieno, and Ken Miki (Japanese syllabary order, titles omitted).

Curator of ddddb, Tetsuya Goto, conducted interviews with each designer about the theme of the exhibition they were involved in and their approach to the PR materials, and extracted keywords based on these. In the case of Keizo Matsui, who was involved in many exhibitions as a supervisor, Goto chose to make Keizo Matsui himself the keyword. Goto also chose to put the exhibitions he was involved in into his own words.

Credits

ddddb Online (website)

Planning/supervision

Tetsuya GOTO

Direction/design/programming

Shunya HAGIWARA

Engineering

Junya KOJIMA

Editing (chronological table)

Sakura NOMIYAMA

Editing (database for the exhibition, etc.)

Akiko KUBO, Miho TAKAGI, Satoshi MASADA

Translation (keywords, about page)

Duncan BROTHERTON

Translation (chronological table)

Fontaine Limited

ddddb Offline (exhibition)

Curator

Tetsuya GOTO

Video

Sulki & Min

Design assistant

Suzuha NAGAO

Exhibition construction

neo projects

Exhibition design

NO ARCHITECTS

*titles omitted