Artist Osamu Sato is unable to determine whether his images come from his brain, or his computer.

Osamu Sato, author of "The Art of Computer Designing – A Black and White Approach", gets a natural high when he designs on his computer.

"I am not able to determine if the images come from my brain or my com-puter. The computer is part of myself."

The 33-year-old Sato is CEO and art director of the small graphic design company Outside Directores in Tokyo, but he calls himself a compu-artist. He developed his ideas on color composition and design under the instruction of Kazuko Shibuya, a famous Kyoto kimono designer.

This book harks back to the how-to-draw genre – but besides two short introductions, it is more of a showcase for Sato's art. He admits that he wanted to publish "only an art book," but those don't sell well in Japan, so he disguised it as a how-to guide.

Sato attempted to simplify computer design by including mostly black-and-white images in his book, which took just five weeks to create. Color is incredibly subjective, he says. Yet he chooses the vibrant color from the S&F Alphabetical Orgasm Series (shown here, from the Macintosh-generated video Compu Movie) as the best example of his design philosophy.

His current project, a CD-ROM version of a Japanese tale called "Tong (Out of the Eastern Brain)," will be released in November.

Sato: +81 (3) 3485 7974, fax +81 (3) 3485 8025.