Regarded as one of the world’s most innovative web designers, Yugo Nakamura is renowned for the wit and complexity of the interactive animations he creates for his personal sites.

When Yugo Nakamura unveiled Version 2.0 of his MONOcrafts site in 1999, it caused a sensation in the web design community. One of the first designers to use the then newly developed Flash 4 software, Nakamura had devised fluid, naturalistic images which proved how powerful a creative tool Flash 4 could be.

MONOcrafts was the product of nearly a decade of experimentation by Nakamura since he had discovered digital media in 1990. Born in Nara, the ancient capital of Japan in 1970, he originally studied civil engineering and landscape architecture at Tokyo University. After graduation, Nakamura spent four years working on bridge-building projects. As a civil engineer, he had become obsessed by his relationship with his surroundings. Nakamura’s interest in digital media was sparked by his desire to create an abstract version of that relationship and also to make things by hand. An important influence was John Maeda, the creative technologist and theoretician whose work at MIT Media Lab has been devoted to transforming the computer into a creative catalyst, rather than a functional tool. Through MONOcrafts and subsequent interactive design projects, such as those on his www.yugop.com and www.surface.yugop.com sites, Nakamura, now based in Tokyo, has striven to replicate the exquisite detailing and refinement of traditional Japanese craftsmanship on the web. Technically, his work is exceptionally complex, born of the intellectual rigor of his early training in civil engineering and landscape architecture. Yet to the user, Nakamura’s interactive images appear engagingly playful thanks to their elegant naturalism and wry wit.

(From: www.designmuseum.org)