In a Japanese publication from the late 1920s, a double page spread features an assortment of Edo-period lettering styles – stylised, squared characters used for household seals, ‘Peony’ characters forming characteristic wavy-edged circles, and ‘fat’ characters, their brushstrokes near-obscured by their corpulence – opposite an advertisement for Paul Renner’s geometric sans serif Futura. The text on the latter reads (in German): “The writing is the soul of each advertisement.”

Placing these letterforms side-by-side was Gendai shōgyō bijutsu zenshū, or The Complete Commercial Artist (TCCA), a 24-part series dedicated to the burgeoning field of commercial art, published between 1928 and 1930 by Tokyo-based Ars. TCCA documented not just graphic design, as the term might be interpreted today, but design as varied as building-scale advertisements, retail interiors, and product packaging – drawing examples from Japan and across the world.

Remembering this publication nearly a century on, is The Complete Commercial Artist: Making Modern Design in Japan, 1928-1930, a new book from Letterform Archive, authored by Gennifer Weisenfeld. Weisenfeld, a professor at Duke University specialising in modern and contemporary Japanese art history, explains that although fine art had been used in commercial settings earlier, it was only in the 1920s that it began to be recognised as a distinct sphere of professional practice – growing rapidly to keep pace with industrialised mass production, new materials and modernist ideas.

Documenting this nascent field worldwide were publications such as Gebrauchsgraphik and Die Reklame in Germany, The Studio in the UK, and Advertising Age in Japan. TCCA emerged as part of “a real-time conversation,” Weisenfeld tells CR, “on a mass-media highway of specialised magazines.”

The Japanese term for commercial art, shōgyō bijutsu, was coined by TCCA editor, Hamada Masuji. But while it was an era of category-forming neologisms, the industry did not slip into being so easily: its proponents “consciously and aggressively forged that status, seeking aesthetic and social legitimacy for the profession”, writes Weisenfeld in the book’s introduction.

TCCA emerged as part of a real-time conversation, on a mass-media highway of specialised magazines

The compendium was a part of this effort, led by a team of designers, educators and theorists. Masuji, more a theorist, and director of the newly founded Commercial Artists Association (CAA), emerged as lead editor, among an editorial committee of fellow CAA member Nakada Sadanosuke; Sugiura Hisui, principal designer for the Mitsukoshi department store; Watanabe Soshū, author and later professor of design at the Imperial Art School; Tatsuke Yoichirō, director of the Japanese Advertising Study Association; and Miyashita Takao, processor of industrial arts at the Tokyo Higher School of Arts and Technology.

Post-war Japanese design may be better known today, but Weisenfeld says that her research leads her to argue for “a much earlier, creative and significant design world in Japan”. She has previously written about the early 1920s Japanese avant-garde group MAVO, which was “interested in breaking down the boundaries between art and daily life”, she says, seeing possibility in “advertising as this liberatory sphere”.

TCCA editors worked hard to source the latest examples of modern design, spanning national variations and movements from the Bauhaus to De Stijl, and Constructivism to Art Nouveau. Its content was both global and local, presenting a Japanese perspective on an international moment – contrasting the essentialising tone with which Western competitors would often approach non-Western work, says Weisenfeld.

Rather than a periodical, TCCA was a series of reference books acquired via a subscription, each volume around the price of a paperback novel. It also featured placeholder designs and accessible how-tos for readers, who might find the copy via their workplace, design schools or a lending library. Cumulatively TCCA provides an encyclopaedic view of the period, rare for “its comprehensiveness, its cornucopia, its capaciousness”, Weisenfeld says.

From the bounty of design within TCCA, Weisenfeld highlights three volumes on Japanese letterforms, “playful” and full of “meta levels” thanks to written Japanese’s formation and traditions, she says. There is the language’s combination of scripts: ideographic, Chinese-derived kanji; phonetic syllabaries, hiragana and katakana; and Romanised words, rōmaji. There is also multidirectionality, as Japanese is traditionally read top to bottom in columns, then right to left, but is also presented in the Western-style of left-to-right rows – freeing designers to position text across the visual plane ahead of Western modernists’ own experiments.

Volumes on retail display, meanwhile, show a far more vivid landscape than today with a dazzling variety of signage, and window displays combining extravagant stage-set-like displays, offering the consumer worlds of possibility through goods available for purchase.

Until now, TCCA has not been presented to an English-speaking audience. The new book, designed by Letterform Archive art director Alice Chau, gives a flavour of the original: the book jacket and cover reproduce its paperback slipcase and covers respectively, while a flatplan shows the contents as well as labelling the printing techniques found within one volume: tri-colour printing (genshokuban); spot colour printing with offset plates (genshoku ofusetto ban); single-colour photo printing (shashinban); and letterpress-printed commentary and essays.

Designers worked hand-in-hand with the state, with their own aims in keeping with the state’s desires for a rationalised and modern society

The new book also frames TCCA’s function as not just a document, but an argument for design’s future, albeit one taking in numerous points of view. It reproduces an extract of the essay that ended the series, where Masuji articulated at length – in a 100-page essay, no less – questions about commercial art’s relation to ideas of beauty, class and purpose, some of which recur today.

To contemporary readers, its mix of Marxist thought and belief in commerce might seem contradictory, but for Masuji, commercial art was the first art “that is truly useful to society”, shaping experience and imbuing everyday life with beauty.

Weisenfeld, whose research also covers Japanese corporate archives, adds that some of these ideas were shared by department stores and cosmetics companies like Shiseido, with the value they placed on design evidenced by carefully kept archives: “It is very clear to me […] that they saw themselves as legitimate creative, cultural and social producers in the market.” Designers also “worked hand-in-hand with the state”, she adds, with their own aims “in keeping with the state’s desires for a rationalised and modern society”.

Letterform Archive will be digitising a full original set of TCCA, which Weisenfeld describes as a “great springboard for more research”. Not only reintroducing an underappreciated moment in global design history – complete with biographies of key Japanese designers – the book also gives recognition to the commercial sphere in which it was born, says Weisenfeld.

“I think too often, we think of commerce, we think of art, or we think of design as bridging those [gaps] but the fact is that commerce is a social and cultural force, and it does produce dynamic and creative aesthetics that change people’s lives.”

The Complete Commercial Artist: Making Modern Design in Japan, 1928-1930 is published by Letterform Archive; letterformarchive.org