Hitotoki Illustrators wanted
During the initial sculpting of the Hitotoki concept, Paul, Craig and I did our best to keep our focus squarely on the written word, almost to the exclusion of everything else. Our initial creative wranglings mostly happened in a text editor, while visuals were cautiously added later, once they proved their worth as supporting elements.
One such element, the image that accompany each story, has since become one of our favorite challenges. While we receive some images from the writer and borrow others from the Creative Commons pool at Flickr, we began asking volunteer illustrators to help us fill the gaps late last year, resulting in some quite beautiful and clever interpretations of the stories they accompany.
If you’re an illustrator who enjoys Hitotoki, and want to take a shot at an upcoming story, please send samples of your work to what [ at ) hitotoki dot org. Assignments are short, sweet, and accompanied by loving praise and gratitude from us editors and a link back to your website.
Shanghai Launch Date Confirmed
Just wanted to send out a quick notice that HITOTOKI SHANGHAI has confirmed a launch date of May 11th! Panthea Lee, our crime fighting China-based editor has managed to finagle some sort of collaboration between Hitotoki Shanghai and the Pangea Day festival on May 10th. There’ll be Shanghai Hitotokis haphazardly and ‘artfully’ plastered about some sort of ‘art space’ plus live paintings by Shanghai based artist, Nial. The Shanghai edition will then launch the following day.
Updates and a Trip Back in Time
As we approach our one year anniversary (!!) for launching the Tokyo - English edition of this site, I thought it would be fun to take a quick peek back at what hitotoki could have been. The above image is one of our first comps. Note the absence of a map (which wasn’t added, actually, until right before launch). The design goals of the project were always simple and certain themes and design elements present in the current revision can be seen in this first-round comp.
In other news: we have a couple new city launches coming up in the next two or three weeks. So keep an eye out! Paul, Chris and I have been utterly hammered with work and projects these past couple of months so updates are moving a little slower than anticipated. But it looks like our fearless local editors are on top of things and are finishing up final edits on rounds of hitotokis for launch.
Thank you to everyone who has submitted entries for these new cities (and those currently launched too!). More soon!
Upcoming Cities
We just wanted to take a moment to update everyone on some behind the scenes activities here at Hitotoki HQ, Tokyo.
Many know about the impending Washington, DC edition of Hitotoki. Please submit (we’re going to extend the deadline) if you have a great hitotoki to share about DC.
What many don’t know is that we’ve found, quizzed, interviewed and subjected to a well-defined battery of tests and physical challenges, editors for Paris and Shanghai editions of Hitotoki. Panthea Lee and Lauren Elkin are two wonderful ladies you will be hearing more about soon. For now, even though we don’t have fancy holding pages up, we are accepting entries. The Shanghai form is available at http://hitotoki.org/hitotoki_submission_shanghai.rtf and the Paris form is available http://hitotoki.org/hitotoki_submission_paris.rtf. They’re also linked to on our submissions page.
Us Hitotoki founders here in Tokyo are neck deep in a bunch of projects right now. I’m trying to finish up the production and design of Art Space Tokyo, whereas Paul and Chris are working on some Tokyo Art Beat related art maps. We have quite a few big Hitotoki updates planned and will be refocusing our collective development magic in this direction in the next few weeks.
Welcome to THE BLOG
No, your eyes are not failing you — Hitotoki now has a blog! A ... hitoblog, if you will.
We’ve been growing (behind the scenes) so quickly recently that we realized we’re going to need a centralized place to announce developments, changes to the site and additional cities. We also wanted a place to collect feedback from you, our voracious readers.
Don’t forget to subscribe to the feed. And expect more exciting blog-like content very soon.
