The Inujima Art Project Seirensho is an art museum which has preserved and reused the remains of the Inujima Refinery, a modern industrial heritage site dating from the Meiji Era that remains on the island of Inujima in the Seto Inland Sea. The building constructed alongside the existing smokestacks serves as a modern art exhibition space, and the remains of the refinery themselves bare also a large-scale work of art. We began the matter of developing a logo mark and title signs for this facility by considering what the message of the design project should be.

Any visitor to Inujima will be overwhelmed by the unique towering presence of this facility. The unexpected cluster of brick building ruins that rise up out of the pure natural environment of the Seto Inland Sea offer a dazzling sense of mystery that transcends space and time. Letting our imaginations run wild with the magical scene, it could be the remains of an ancient Indus Valley civilization, an abandoned Roman Empire border fort on the shore of the Aegean Sea, or even a near-future wasteland out of a science fiction movie. We thought that graphic design could function as a catalyst for amplifying these flights of fancy and creating a story in the mind of each individual visitor.

The method we chose was to use typography to superimpose an image of the ancient Roman Empire onto the Inujima refinery – a Meiji-era modern industrial heritage site, placing a layer of fictional universality onto a layer of indigenous non-fiction. Through the design of this logo mark and signage, we hoped that visitors would weave together their own stories from an image plasma where different times and places intersect and fact and fiction are intermixed.

Next I would like to describe some of the sign details. The towering stainless steel sign on the baked cedar outer walls of the ticket center is one of the first sights greeting visitors when the ferry, which is the only access to the island, comes into the port. The sign was made by installing stainless steel silver cut-out characters onto the walls made of baked cedar – a traditional building material which is resistant to salt and corrosion and which is unique to this area. This combination expressed the local character and tradition of the island of Inujima in the Seto Inland Sea together with the modern flavor of the project. The inscribed marble stone sign at the ticket center was created by engraving characters into artificial marble using a font that was meant to evoke the letters on the Trajan Column inscription of Ancient Rome. These catalyst signs were intended to help the appearance of the facility leave an impression that soars into the universality of time and space by superimposing an image of ancient Mediterranean civilization onto the scenery of the Seto Inland Sea and the towering remains of the refinery that evoke no particular nation. The sign made of rusted iron plate at the entrance to the facility is joined to a red rust fence with a texture that is a particularly good match for the metal-containing Karami brick which is unique to this refinery. The Seirensho logo type is based on a metal character font used in the early Meiji Era, the same time when the Inujima refinery was operating, and was installed on the front entrance as raised characters of iron plate to express the basis of the cultural value of the Inushima refinery as a modern industrial heritage site.

In reconsidering what the job of graphic design actually does, this job led us to a conclusion. Logo marks and signs themselves are not graphic design. Rather, “graphic design” is a general tem that applies to the business of manipulating visible items – flat, or three-dimensional, material or immaterial – in order to create a new “story” somewhere beyond them. In other words, it designs ideas while still remaining based on specific objects. For example, from the perspective of an entire large building, the design of signs represents no more than a tiny fraction of the physical mass. However if it is possible for these signs to somehow change the value of the entire building, then this can be described as a bit of small magic created by the power of graphic design as it manipulates the “story” behind the “objects.”