Icograda 2003 Congress Visualogue: A Visual Dialogue Between Designers

Abstract

Eighty percent of Japan is covered by mountains. Steep mountains. In traditional painting, they often are depicted rising from a mist, with no visible paths leading up from the base. Representing divine worlds, serving as destinations for pilgrimages, and symbolic of the spiritual journey towards enlightenment, mountains have been important for Shintoism and Buddism since the beginning of Japanese civilization. The practice of meditation, often described in the West as a departure from the physical for a spiritual world, in a sense often is grounded in the physicality of a mountain. Mandalas in India and Japanese “kakejiku” scrolls are used as meditation tools, representing a graphic mapping of the paths up a mountain to enlightenment, and allowing meditators to ascend a mountain without leaving their tatami mat. For the identity of the Icograda (International Council of Graphic Design Associations) 2003 conference, called “Visualogue” and held October 7–12 in Japan’s fourth largest city, Nagoya, a mountain was used as a graphic identity to represent the journey to