[ Tomoko Miho is the design world's best-kept secret. A distinctive presence—but a very private person—she has avoided the spotlight. She does not need it, for her designs, endowed with a crystalline clarity, have a luster all their own. She never attempted to make a name for herself, but she has acquired a formidable reputation among her peers: “A minimalist and a Modernist—in the best sense of the term” (George Tscherny). “One of the most perceptive problem-solvers I know” (Rudolph de Harak). “A master of the dramatic understatement” (John Massey).”

"One of her gifts is to find potential greatness where others merely see constraints. Born in Los Angeles, Tomoko Kawakami spent part of her early years with her family in an Arizona internment camp. “In order to recover, we had to excel,” she says. “The experience forced many Japanese-Americans to seek new horizons.” Her new horizons would be defined by fortuitous design opportunities. A summer scholarship from the Minneapolis School of Art (now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design) opened a realm of possibilities. A visit to the Museum of Modern Art during her first trip to Manhattan after high school helped her focus her professional ambition. But it was a full scholarship from the Art Center School in Los Angeles (now the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena) that would truly challenge her sense of aesthetics and broaden her field of vision.]

In the early 1960s, she took a six-month tour of Europe. By the end of this trip, Tomoko understood what would be her mandate—to “join space and substance,” as she later wrote. To draw the big picture, its message and its context—to be a graphic designer.

Tomoko's impenetrable demeanour conceals an innate ability to confront unfamiliar situations, absorb new information, and integrate jarring contradictions. She sees order in clutter; she enjoys translating abstract concepts in clear visual terms. As a result, her design solutions have an unassuming, effortless, and lucid quality.

To explain her particular sense of space, Tomoko alludes to shakkei, a traditional Japanese garden design discipline that integrates the background with the foreground, bringing distant views into clear focus. Meaning “borrowing scenery,” shakkei transforms the experience of space, imparting a sense of depth, width, and breadth to a small environment.

Tomoko Miho carefully gardens every inch of graphic space. She often borrows spatial conventions from the three-dimensional world, making the two-dimensional plane appear larger, deeper, more inclusive. For her, the page is not an opaque screen, but a threshold. Her designs invite viewers to cross over into a multilayered world.