Typical online blogs do travel, food, culture, etc with a mix of words and images, but good images are really what makes a blog work. We’ve always run into that ourselves, as even a seemingly boring post can go crazy with the right picture. All of Takashi’s images on his blog Sync Ideas are drawn by him, as the site is really more a collection of scans from his notebooks.

Instead of featuring food porn (of which we are fans), Sync Ideas is all about creating the feeling of the meal, describing where it was, who was there, and combining a collection of sketches to make a blog entry that needs no formatting, no embedding, and is done entirely by hand.

Perhaps with the increase of drawing applications for tablets we will notice an increase of digital hand-drawn blogs, but there’s something really charming about doing your blog with pencils and paper, but still being willing to share it all with the world online without reserve.

Follow Takashi on Twitter at @hayetenokouji, and find more of his analog blog on Facebook as well.

via Shift East

Here’s a video recap of how it all went down. If there’s anything better than beer under fully bloomed cherry trees, I can’t think of it. Also, if there’s anything that will ruin a white jacket faster than that I can’t think of it either. Speaking from experience.

Session will start at 7pm Japan time, so 6am EST for the early birds (or late ones) in the US. For everyone else, tune in on USTREAM to watch it all unfold at this link.

We’ve just had the opportunity to talk with Andrew Pollard, president of PROJECT, about his thoughts on Japan and its place in the world of retail and design. We’ll be putting together some of his insights in an upcoming post to augment our first post on PROJECT: WOOSTER, but in the meantime take a look at their latest videos on their time in Tokyo and Japan in general.

The office connection doesn’t get more explicit than with the Break on the Desk series from Kirin, which features flavored teas with zero calories. To liven up the break the packaging also features a “break time gallery” of original artwork printed on the side of the box. Collect em’ all!

Aside from the first flavors of milk tea, herb and lemon, and straight tea there are new grapefruit and chocolate varieties.

The canned coffee Suntory Boss Zero features retro packaging and goes with an accompanying campaign for lovers of classic trains. The Japan SL Collection is a series of model trains that come nicely packaged on top of can 2-packs, but the single can trains are a bit more fun. Attached to the end of each can, you turn the product itself into a rolling barrel of a train, perfect for gliding across the desk when you’re done admiring the Break Time Gallery your tea came with.

While it might not seem that beer is targeted at office workers, the Asahi Dry Zero is a new non-alcoholic, low-calorie beer substitute to compete with Kirin and Suntory. In a nice design move they’ve actually made the can look very similar to a real alcoholic can of Super Dry, making it less outstanding to others. Japanese aren’t known for enjoying a beer at lunch, but we’ve noticed a fair amount of office workers (mostly women) having non-alcoholic beers during lunch time around Tokyo. Purely anecdotal on our part, but enough to notice at least.

Yeah, it’s fake beer in every way except the color, but I’ve had a few when having ramen and getting behind the wheel and the crispness definitely beats not having any beer at all. If my dirty little secret is that I don’t hate it, I guess that’s not so bad!