About us

Osaka Design is the professional website of Rob Hori, an Osaka-based illustrator and designer, specializing in web design and programming.

Since opening in 2004 (when it was known as Studio Armchair Samurai), Osaka Design has been providing web site design, illustration services and graphic design to companies and individuals in Japan and internationally.

About our motto, “minimalist design, maximum impact”

There is a commonly held belief that complexity is advanced and simplicity is basic. However, the holy grail of design, whether web or graphic, is to develop something that is both simple and powerful. Easy-to-use but advanced. No one wants something that is complicated to use yet performs only simple tasks.

Simple is difficult and simple is beautiful because simple has to be perfect. It’s easy to hide substandard work in ever increasing levels of complexity. To create something minimalist but attractive and arresting is not only practical design, but challenging, stimulating work — which is why I love my job!

About our technologies

When building web sites, I always code for accessibility and usability: in non-geek-speak, everyone should be able to use your site with minimal fuss and effort. The KISS principle is something I hold near and dear to my heart (for art and graphic design as well as web related projects).

I build web sites using PHP, MySQL, (X)HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In addition, I also work with XML, Perl and Flash. Modern websites are built with all manner of different of software, from blogs, such as TextPattern and WordPress, to e-commerce programs like Magento. To support my development work, I’ve developed a solid set of core tools that I keep coming back to:

  • CodeIgniter is an absolute dream to work with when compared to other PHP frameworks I’ve tried. It’s fast, it’s simple and it gets out of the way to let you work quickly and efficiently.
  • jQuery was nothing short of a revolutionary experience when I discovered it – writing JavaScript not only became much quicker, but it allowed me to create all manner of complex functions and effects easily.