Tanaka Ikko was born in 1930 in Nara and studied at the Department of Design of Kyoto Municipal School of Painting (now Kyoto City University of Arts) and after graduation started to work at Kanebo. In 1952, he changed to the Sankei Newspaper and since then participated in the design group “A Club,” together with Kazumasa Nagai, Tsunehisa Kimura and Toshihiro Katayama. In 1957, he moved to Tokyo and joined the advertisement and design company “Light Publicity.” He later formed a project team with Hideo Mukai at Toray Industries where they were responsible for shaping all aspects of the PR and advertisement strategy of the company.

Tanaka over the course of his career became something of a godfather of Japanese commercial and advertisement design. Tanaka has been teaching since 1952 at Kuwasawa Design School. When in 1960 Nippon Design Center was founded, Tanaka joined in together with other prominent designers such as Yusaku Kamekura, Hiromu Hara and Ryuichi Yamashiro, and quit his affiliation with Light Publicity. In 1963, he founded his own studio. One of his first major commissions was the design of pictograms, and the reverse side of the medals (the front design was by Taro Okamoto), for the Tokyo Olympics of 1964. Tanaka died in 2002.