Yugo Nakamura

Yugo Nakamura is one of Japan’s leading web designers who is gaining recognition more and more from around the world. The thing that is getting him recognized is his unique and seamless interface design for websites. He has won various awards for his work in Flash web design and is continuing to find ways to streamline the interface environment.

His approach to creating his sites is to develop alternative methods of visual communication on the web. His interfaces are far from traditional, saying that, “I’d like my work to be a filter that lets the interesting parts of the new media environments – the computers and the people who are involved – become more alive.” His designs force users to reconsider the limits of the online environment. Not only is his work in interface design for websites, but it is also in creating works of art through Flash programming, such as his piece “Entropy”. In this work, he delves into the concept of complexity and how complex things can happen from a large number of very basic things. The piece starts with a single entity that becomes connected to another one similar to it every second and eventually becomes very large and complex. It is also interactive in that users are able to change the way the entity grows by clicking the mouse as it expands.

Another project that he collaborated with another designer named Keita Kitamura is called AmazType. It is a completely new way to browse Amazon.com in which the user inputs their search criteria into the program and then dynamically explores the content that is gathered from Amazon.com. Instead of viewing the results in a particular order, they are all spread out across the screen in a myriad of images that the search brings up. The user can then click on one of the pictures and get more information on the product and even go directly to the Amazon website for more information or to purchase the item. On top of all of this, the images actually spell out the word that you searched for. It’s a truly unique and amazing way to shop on Amazon.

He says that much of his influence is the nature. To get people to reconsider the limits of online environments, he says he “utilizes simple mathematics underlying natural complexity to create online interactions that are useable and familiar because their behavior is modeled on the natural world.”