Go home and make something.

Overview
The Joy of Making: DIY for Living (つくるよろこび 生きるためのDIY) ran at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum from July 24 to October 8, 2025. We led creative direction and graphic design, with art direction by Shiho Kunikage of OOKIIINU.

Question
Why make something when you can buy almost anything?

Challenge
The show defines DIY as solving the problem in front of you with your own ingenuity, from fixing up a home to residents shaping their own neighborhood. It’s a way to live better, and a way through hard times, including for people who lost a great deal to earthquakes or money troubles. It’s also a joy. The identity needed that trial-and-error energy, made with care.

Approach
The creative director and art director thought it through on their own first, then together, and kept coming back to one character in the title: る. In Japanese, it carries a sense of will, of doing. DIY moves forward by trial and error, so る zigzags across the design, layered and quick.

From the artists in the show, we chose a hammer piece by Dunhill & O’Brien for its sense of making and its tangle of lines, and matched the key color to the artworks. For the pitch, we painted the title by hand, in real paint. It showed the actual colors, and reminded us what making feels like. The identity runs through posters, the venue, signage, captions, tickets and everything online and off.

Then there’s the catalogue. It’s made for visitors who walk out wanting to make something, and get home to find no tools and no materials, as many in Tokyo do. So it comes with clay, sold in a can printed with the exhibition title. A place to start collecting.

Outcome
The exhibition doesn’t end at the exit. It goes home with you, in a can.