Alphabetical Orgasm

Artist Osamu Sato is unable to determine whether his images come from his brain, or his computer.

Artist Osamu Sato is unable to determine whether his images come from his brain, or his computer.

Osamu Sato, author of "The Art of Computer Designing – A Black and White Approach", gets a natural high when he designs on his computer.

"I am not able to determine if the images come from my brain or my com-puter. The computer is part of myself."

The 33-year-old Sato is CEO and art director of the small graphic design company Outside Directores in Tokyo, but he calls himself a compu-artist. He developed his ideas on color composition and design under the instruction of Kazuko Shibuya, a famous Kyoto kimono designer.

This book harks back to the how-to-draw genre – but besides two short introductions, it is more of a showcase for Sato's art. He admits that he wanted to publish "only an art book," but those don't sell well in Japan, so he disguised it as a how-to guide.

Sato attempted to simplify computer design by including mostly black-and-white images in his book, which took just five weeks to create. Color is incredibly subjective, he says. Yet he chooses the vibrant color from the S&F Alphabetical Orgasm Series (shown here, from the Macintosh-generated video Compu Movie) as the best example of his design philosophy.

His current project, a CD-ROM version of a Japanese tale called "Tong (Out of the Eastern Brain)," will be released in November.

Sato: +81 (3) 3485 7974, fax +81 (3) 3485 8025.