Hello, and welcome to this week’s Design Diary, a collection of five projects from across the world that have impressed us this week. 

For more along these lines (and so many others) follow along all day, every day on Instagram @AIGAeyeondesign, Facebook, and Twitter @AIGAeyeondesign.

“The Japanese capital is a unique place… It unites cultural extremes: it is a city where the futuristic meets the traditional and tranquility meets speed.” That’s according to the editorial team behind Slanted, the international design magazine out of Germany, now on its 31st issue. The new issue contains interviews, essays, and illustrations that go deep into the design scene in Tokyo, featuring the likes of design studio &Form, graphic designer Shin Akiyama, and renowned design magazine IDEA. All packaged within a cheerful pink cover, with a simple and intriguing layout.

The magazine issue launches continue with #14 of Mohawk Maker Quarterly, the beautifully produced magazine from paper company Mohawk. This is the biggest issue to date—224 pages—and the new release is designed by Hybrid Design and features an entire package on Donald Judd and his foundation in Marfa, Texas, as well as articles on transparency, failure, authority, and myth-making. All of this is of course printed on the finest (and newest) supply Mohawk has to offer—though we’d recommend reading this one over a swatch book.

“Sexy Cyborg characters are simultaneously saving and destroying the universe while the wrinkly faced king is eating glazed pork,” reads the description, in its entirety, of the new Colorama release, GAIA7. The comic is the work of Marc Hennes and Paul Paetzel, is riso-printed and perfect bound, and full of federal blue and mint green, airbrushed to intergalactic ’80s perfection. We’re big fans of Colorama, a riso printing studio from Berlin that continually produces smart and striking work from some of the best illustrators around, and this release is no exception.

Elsewhere in the zine world, Swiss publishing house Nieves has just put out a work from friend of EoD Leesh Adamerovich entitled Stool Sample. It’s about stools (the furniture! why, what did you think it was?) and it’s an “uncanny furniture study about objecthood and the spirit of objects.” The thread running through Adamerovich’s shadowy, monochromatic illustrations of stools is one of environments, and the way they affect us psychologically. “Because they are made by humans, objects provide visual information such as state, condition, age, gender and agency,” she writes. Serene and beautiful work.

And finally, the last of the compelling publications sent our way this week came in the form of a book: The One & The Many by illustrator Jan Buchczik. A story of identity and finding oneself, the 102-page book features illustrations and short narrative pieces that tell a “cloudy tale about the frictions between one‘s own life—limited in time and space—and the curiosity and desire to be somebody else.” Looks lovely.