TOKYO ARCHIVE

A living digital archive cataloguing Japanese retro computing posters, software packaging, and graphic design ephemera from the 1980s and 1990s.

Motivation

The visual language of early Japanese computing culture is extraordinarily rich — dense with information hierarchy, unconventional grid usage, and a unique fusion of Latin and CJK typography. Most of it exists only on ageing physical media.

Structure

Each artefact is stored as a Sanity document with structured metadata: publisher, year, typefaces identified, grid analysis notes. The front end renders each entry as a "specimen sheet" — a full-bleed scan with an overlaid data sidebar.