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Multifont Buckle by Steel Toe Studios

All you letterpress fanatics, beware: Steel Toe Studios, a design and metalsmithing company in Seattle, recently came out with a hand-forged belt buckle cast in a pattern to mimic metal type.

You can buy it through the studio's Etsy store or direct from the studio, where you can use a mini-Flash app to select buckle types and belt sizes. You also get the choice of purchasing a belt made from recycled bicycle tire tubes to match! (The belts are made by the local firm Alchemy Goods, who continues to find new uses for old rubber, vinyl advertisements, and other leavings.)

Major props to my coworker Carrie Byrne, who spotted the studio, purchased one of the belts, wore it in to work, and ended up easily convincing me into buying one of my own!

[Edit 01/08/09: The belt buckle isn't made from metal type; it is cast from a pattern formed from metal type. No lead for you. :) ]

Spotted in Japan: Graniph

One of the most fascinating thing about observing Japanese design culture is the use of the English language for pure aesthetic concerns, usually without regard for proper use. I can't recall seeing a single Japanese person wearing a t-shirt without Roman text on it, usually arranged in a haphazard sort of grammar that made half-sense to my rigid American ear.

At first, it almost hurt to see such illogical sentences paraded down Omote-sando in the name of fashion. But in time I found them endearing and ended up buying a few out of sheer whimsy, such as this one:

"Fragment: Many times of the life seem to have come to lose its way. It was you in such a case that I encouraged me anytime, and watched easily. Though I picked up the piece of the conventional life and gathered you, I have become it withou any unity. But I think that it is the life. There is not it in the straight road imagining, and the incline is intense, and the way winds."

Multiply this by 5,000, and you get the idea of what you'd experience shopping in downtown Tokyo.

Graniph, whose stores I had seen all around Japan, I had initially assumed to be a purveyor of t-shirts such as these -- especially because their Helvetica-based logo had echoes of American Apparel in it (or vice-versa). Boy, was I wrong. I had 5 hours to kill in Tokyo-Narita Airport and 10,000 yen burning a hole in my pocket, and when I finally went into their store there, I wanted to buy the whole place. My wife and I probably spent forty-five minutes tearing through every shirt that they had, finally settling on these two. (We couldn't fit any more in our carry-ons.)

Spotted in Japan: TEMAS

Oh TEMAS, how I love thee. With an HQ in Kyoto and a satellite store in Tokyo, TEMAS is the inheritor of a top-secret black dying technique married to some sleek, sophisticated product designs. Seriously, you've never seen black bags this... black. The picture above doesn't do their goods justice, especially when they splash a bright red or blue across their "blackest black" bags, pants, suits, shoes, and other sleek accessories

Check out the TEMAS site (in Japanese). I believe you can also purchase some of their goods online, though there was a stunning portfolio case that I couldn't find on the Web.