Comparative Study of Shigeo Fokuda‘s Posters and Methods of Creating Optical Error

Abstraction
Shigeo Fokuada is one of the geniuses of contemporary graphic designers of Japan. He was born in Tokyo in 1932. After finishing his studies in national university of fine arts & music (1956), he worked in many fields of professional graphic design and his poster designs gained world reputation. He as a representative of avant-garde graphic design, with increasing international attendance of Japan from the 1960s, presented his works in many solo and group exhibitions all over the world. He was a member of AGI and from the late 1980s taught at Yale Newhaven as a guest professor. Fukuda’s fame is in his kind of thinking and different view. He as a great designer saw the world in a different way and manifested it in his works. In designing posters, for conveying ideas and his reception to the audience he have used many different methods, but one of them that is his special and distinguishes him from other designers is using of visual error. He deceives the vision ability of the audience with this method. In examination of some of his posters we will understand that the artist for the purpose of increasing the effect of his works on his audiences, has combined visual elements in such a way that to have  complicated, unreal and unimaginable relations and engage mind of the audiences. Some of his posters have designed on the basis of visual error techniques. The technique of negative and positive spaces is the most important way for him to create visual error in the works; he does so through relations between image and context. Negative and positive spaces have harmonized relation, and changeably complete each other. Focuda as a designer always takes context into consideration, he consciously draws a design that its negative image has importance, and these two images (negative & positive) are inseparable. This artist in using equivocal images and textures, interference of image and context has considered this important issue. This article with comparative-analytic method’ principals considers the artist’s posters and propose this hypothesis that Fokuda with the aid of various visual error techniques (equivocal images and textures, equivocal 3D images, impossible images, interference of shape and context and mixed images) has created ambiguous and wandering images. In proving this hypothesis, at first, geometrical and visual errors are explained and then various visual errors will be introduced and compared with fokuda’s posters. In this comparison there are some similarities between techniques of visual error and some of Fokuda’s works, and he has been able to use this visual trick in various ways in his works.