brief & opposition
Every project starts with two notes — what the client says, and what the client’s opposite would say.
矛盾 / contradiction studio
mujun (矛盾) is the contradiction of the unstoppable spear and the unbreakable shield — an old paradox we treat as a working method. Every brief contains its own opposition; we begin there.
The studio was founded between two cities and two disciplines — print finishers in Kyoto, motion designers in Tokyo — and we have never tried to resolve the difference. Misregistered ink, perfect grids, psychedelic posters, disciplined typography: the friction is the work.
Bold-confident, unapologetically direct. We do not pitch.
A wordmark drawn from broken pottery seams. The crack is the logo; the gold is the brand. Print-first identity rolled out across annual reports, signage and a fully variable digital system.
A living neon system above a 9-seat counter in Dogenzaka. The studio drew the tubes by hand, then mapped a 360-frame animation cycle that reads as steam at midnight, broth at dawn.
Each issue prints two opposing essays bound back-to-back. Readers physically turn the magazine over to flip sides of an argument. Hand-set masthead, riso interior, two-spine binding.
Every project starts with two notes — what the client says, and what the client’s opposite would say.
Hand drawing on yellow tracing paper. Nothing on screen for the first 72 hours. The pen has fewer prejudices than the cursor.
8 columns, 16px gutters, no exceptions. The sketch must survive contact with the grid — if it can’t, it wasn’t the answer.
Two-colour riso pulls of every screen. Misregistration is not a bug; it’s the studio voice. We keep the off-color edge.
Pink against cyan. Cream against void. Colour is never decoration in the studio — it carries the contradiction.
We send the work with the opposing argument attached. Clients who keep both win the brief twice.
Two-colour riso, type cases, registration tables. Open Tuesday afternoons by appointment.
35.0116 · 135.7681Animation, neon mockups, projection tests. Behind a vintage record shop in Daikanyama.
35.6489 · 139.6993Archive of paradox — postcards, posters, contradictions in print collected since 2014.
34.6937 · 135.5023A table that moves between cities once a quarter. Where new contradictions are noticed first.
−−· −−contradiction is not a problem to be solved. it is the fuel of every studio that still believes a poster can change a city.