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1 month ago
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In Japan, a largely unknown artist has a paradoxically outsized influence on public design through his service – Irasutoya. His work is so omnipresent that some have described Irasutoya as a “social infrastructure”. Due to its generous licensing model, the graphics are everywhere, from NHK news segments and local ads for a farmer’s market to descriptions on how to use the microwave at a convenience store. Even on a remote mountaintop in Nikko, I spotted an Irasutoya illustration on a sign warning against drone use.
By 2014, Microsoft discontinued its clip art library and replaced it with a Bing search panel for license-free images, resulting in a hodgepodge of images cleared through Creative Commons. The result was fragmentation; without a controlled source of imagery, no modern equivalent of Screen Beans has emerged. Yet in Japan, Irasutoya has become what Microsoft’s clip art once was: a default so deeply embedded that it has become an inextricable part of public-facing design and is shaping the country’s visual vernacular today.
How Accessibility Creates Ubiquity
Irasutoya’s success is not just about style or abundance but also accessibility. Its clip art is free for personal and commercial purposes, with a licensing model that allows up to 20 images for free and charges only 1,000 yen per additional image beyond that. Irasutoya’s website is open, intuitive, and primarily ad-supported, unlike many stock image sites that require logins and expensive subscriptions or have pricey per-image licensing costs. Irasutoya is unique in that there is barely a barrier to entry besides internet access, making it the first and sometimes only choice for stock imagery.
This phenomenon is not unique to Japan. On a recent work trip to Vietnam in 2024, I noticed another example of how accessibility shapes visual culture, this time in typography. Vietnam’s graphic design industry is still developing, shaped by its complex linguistic needs and relatively young design history. Because professional design services and custom typefaces are not yet widely recognised as necessities, many businesses rely on default system fonts.
I was surprised by the ultra-bold and bubbly display font, Cooper Black, that was seemingly everywhere, from café menus to storefront signage. My Saigon-based friend and type designer Cao Xuân Đức explained that many business owners simply select the first appealing font in their publishing software. Without a strong tradition of custom typography and with limited affordable typefaces supporting Vietnamese diacritics, Cooper Black has become the natural default. Over time, as numerous people and organisations repeatedly make these choices, they reinforce themselves: what was once just an available option becomes the norm. The result is a typographic landscape inadvertently shaped by the accessibility of design resources.
Just as Cooper Black is now synonymous with Vietnamese signage, Irasutoya has become inseparable from Japanese public graphics.
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