As a Web and Graphic Design Company in Kurashiki, Okayama – 2025

Note: This article is an updated and revised version of “As a Web and Graphic Design Company in Kurashiki, Okayama – 2025 Part 1,” originally published on January 2, 2025.

Create. Energize. Empower.

This may sound simple, but our theme for this year is “Energy.” As a web and graphic design company, we could have chosen a cooler or more sophisticated term. However, this year, we’ve decided to focus on this straightforward word.

The first step in this journey is ensuring that we ourselves are energized. Being energized doesn’t mean staying in full-throttle offensive mode all the time. It’s about maintaining a balanced lifestyle—eating well, working diligently, exercising, resting, and getting enough sleep. This foundation allows us to stay genuinely energized.

When we’re energized, we gain clarity and perspective. With this clarity, we’re more likely to notice new ideas, spark creativity, prevent mistakes, and—most importantly—create something truly impactful. Whether it’s a website or a graphic design piece, we aim to produce work that inspires, uplifts, and empowers our clients.

Staying energized brings peace of mind and allows us to achieve more. With this mindset, we can create high-quality websites, compelling designs, and work that moves and energizes our clients, helping their businesses thrive.

This positive cycle—where our energized efforts inspire and empower our clients, who in turn give us strength to keep going—is what we aim to achieve.

Just as athletes prioritize their physical and mental well-being to perform at their best, we believe that staying energized is the key to delivering exceptional work.

Staying energized doesn’t mean constantly working at full power. In fact, one of the secrets to great design lies in the balance of intensity and subtlety. Similarly, in our work, it’s important to know when to apply effort and when to ease off.

The art of “working with ease” is simple in theory but challenging in practice. It’s about distributing your energy wisely—focusing intensely when necessary but also staying flexible and calm when needed. By doing so, we can achieve our goals efficiently and effectively.

Knowing when to ease off allows us to maintain quality, deliver excellent results, and sustain our energy for the long haul. This is the key to staying energized and productive over time.

When we talk about “play,” we don’t just mean enjoying leisure time. Here, play refers to engaging with our tools and exploring their possibilities with curiosity and creativity.

For us, tools include computers, smartphones, cameras, and software. Mastering these tools directly impacts the quality of our work. Approaching them with a playful mindset leads to discoveries and improvements in our skills.

Just as soccer players hone their ball-handling skills, we believe that playing with our tools helps us expand both the depth and range of our creative expressions.

As a small company, our strength lies in the hands-on involvement of our leadership. The person running the company is also a web designer, graphic designer, and creative lead. This means we personally handle everything from designing and programming to photography, character creation, and animation production. This multifaceted expertise is what sets AEDI apart.

We constantly ask ourselves, “Can we create something more interesting?” or “Is there another approach we haven’t tried?” These questions guide our use of tools and technology. Our thought processes directly shape how we use our tools, and in turn, those tools expand our ideas and streamline our work.

What’s more, our tools sometimes surprise us by enabling the creation of outcomes even better than we originally envisioned.

At AEDI, we are a web and graphic design company based in Kurashiki, Okayama, offering a wide range of services nationwide. These include website creation, WordPress development, multilingual site construction, and app UI/UX design under our “Web Design Service.”

We also provide “Graphic Design Service” for items like business cards, logos, flyers, leaflets, catalogs, and posters. In addition, we offer “Character Design Service” for service mascots and game characters, as well as “Motion Design Service” for animations and motion graphics. To tie it all together, we provide comprehensive branding under our “Brand Design Service.”

We are also preparing to launch a new website creation service called “SimpleTastes”, designed for all businesses and organizations, offering websites that combine affordable pricing, high quality, and essential functionality.
(Launched on February 24, 2025)

SimpleTastes is a sister brand of AEDI’s website creation services, specializing in the affordable pricing segment.
For fully original websites designed and developed from scratch, please continue to contact us through AEDI’s main website as before.

As part of this initiative, we also operate LogoLand, a logo-focused online store tailored for clients who value distinctive branding. Using the ST Base platform from SimpleTastes, LogoLand offers customizable, logo-centric websites for small businesses and mid-sized enterprises.

Our projects for this year are already planned six months ahead.

Putting last year behind us, we’re starting fresh with a renewed spirit. As a small web and design company based in Kurashiki, Okayama, we’re ready to tackle each day with energy and enthusiasm, one step at a time.

How about you? Why not leave behind the events of last year—or even just yesterday—set a goal, and take your first step toward something new today?

Just like the law of inertia, even the smallest actions, when continued, can build momentum. And with persistence, that momentum could eventually lead to achieving something great.

We, too, are committed to creating meaningful work that energizes our clients and contributes, even in small ways, to empowering and inspiring others. Your satisfaction and joy are what fuel our own energy and drive.

We look forward to another year of working together and bringing positive impact to the world.

(Stay tuned for Part 2 in six months!)

Now, a quick reflection on the first half of 2025.
(By the way, I’m feeling pretty worn out today—I went hiking in the Wake Alps in Wake Town, Wake District, Okayama this morning.)

Our projects for this year are already planned six months ahead. That’s what we wrote earlier in this post. So, how did it turn out?

Over the past six months, we completed five projects—while another five remain unfinished. If we were to grade ourselves, it would probably be 50 out of 100.

Other aspects of our work also left much to be desired.

In short, we still have a long way to go.

That said, one thing has become very clear: I truly want to create more websites and do more design. It’s what I genuinely love doing.

We’ve also come to understand our weaknesses—finally. (Yes, I know—it took us long enough!)

We’re now working on addressing those weak points. In the second half of the year, we’re determined to tackle what we couldn’t finish earlier. By year’s end, we want to be able to say, “I’m glad we kept going.”

Because really, there’s nothing else to do but keep going.

Think. Make. Play.

Today, I visited the office of one of our long-time clients in Kurashiki, Okayama. I went to personally deliver our final invoice and to say thank you in person. Normally, I would send the invoice by email, but this time, I felt strongly that I needed to visit them face-to-face.

This client had their website created by us ten years ago. Since then, we’ve continued to provide regular support and maintenance without interruption.

In the middle of this month, I received an unexpected phone call from them. Although I’ll keep the details private, they informed me that, due to an M&A, their company would soon be absorbed into a major firm based in Okayama.

I only learned about this a few days before the transition and had no prior knowledge of what was happening. It came as a real surprise.

During the hour-long conversation I had with their representative today, I came to understand that the reasons behind the decision were not simple. There were several factors involved, including external pressures.

Still, I couldn’t help but wonder: Was there more we could have done through the power of web and design to support them?

AEDI exists to enrich our clients’ businesses and activities through thoughtful web development and design. If we are unable to fulfill that mission, our purpose as a company loses its meaning.

Fulfilling requests is, of course, important. But we also strive to go one step further—using web and design as tools to help solve problems and move businesses forward. So I ask myself: did we truly do all we could?

Naturally, there are limits to how involved we can be in a client’s management decisions, and in most cases, it’s not our place. But even so, I can’t shake the feeling that there might have been something more we could have done.

To our current clients, our future clients, and to those in Kurashiki, Okayama, and across Japan:

If there’s anything you’re facing—any challenge where web or design might be of help—please don’t hesitate to reach out to AEDI.