Kenneth Hite, respected RPG reviewer, author, designer, and editor just gave me some big props over on his livejournal, the Prince of Cairo.
Says Kenneth:
… like The Mountain Witch, this book is a triumph of Joshua Newman’s design, which somehow manages to combine occasional bold-face, sidebar/footnotes, and ragged-right margins into a clean, evocative look that is appropriately “Japanese” without being Orientalist or fey.
What’s particularly nice about this is that one of my design goals was to explicitly avoid Orientalist, Legend of Five Rings stereotypes and draw from my love of actual Japanese art.
Lots of this:
and a little bit of this:
And Kenneth was nice enough to notice.
Thanks, Kenneth!
I like that image of the squash on the top of this post. That is a squash, isn’t it? and:
Congratulations.
Yeah, it’s some sort of bitter, Japanese squash. It came up on an image search for “shibui” and I thought it was beautiful. It was on a seed catalogue site all in Japanese, but I thought it went so nicely with the tea cups, that it had to go here.