Signal of the week

Packaging · 13 stories, +8 vs last week

Packaging: 13 stories in seven days, +8 on the week before.

Gooey Goose — Brand Identity & Packaging Design Packaging of the World

Moonlit Night, La Maison | Mooncake Packaging Packaging of the World

Latest

Core77Early Transforming Furniture: Richard Neutra's Camel Table In the 1930s Richard Neutra , the Austrian architect who'd made his home in California, designed an early example of flexible-use furniture.

September 23

Core77The UI of a Stencil Machine Just over a century ago, Illinois businessman John W. Marsh launched his Marsh Stencil Machine company.

September 23

Core77What an Anodized Aluminum Baseball Cap Holder Says About Our Product Landscape You have to wonder what the pioneers of industrial design would make of this day and age. The original promise of ID was to harness the power of mass production to create useful objects for the…

September 23

Creative BloqThe Brand Impact Award Winners 2026 have been revealed! Find out the full list of Gold, Silver and Bronze awards, as well as Best of Show and the Social Impact Award.

September 23

DisegnoThe Crit #43: Alexandra Gerber The Crit , a fortnightly podcast from Disegno , invites designers to pass judgement on their careers to date, sharing both their favourite designs and worst missteps.

September 23

My Scandinavian HomeSoft Greens, Golden Tones and a Fairytale Children's Bedroom It's quite incredible what a difference a little colour can make to a home. It doesn't have to be a lot either – sometimes just a splash here and there is enough to completely change the feel of a…

September 23

PRINTThe Daily Heller: Typographically Speaking, What Comes Next? The second ITL Fonts & AI Conference is happening online in October at a moment when AI’s existential flame is at a high.

September 23

Fast Company DesignAlysa Liu abides by her own fashion rules As a child, Alysa Liu’s identity was bound to her sport. While other kids experimented with fashion to figure out who they were, Liu’s wardrobe was strictly functional from the time she hit the ice…

September 23

発見, hakken: a finding. This is a record of what one designer notices in a week.

I grew up beside the Arakawa, in Adachi, and spent five years in a Ginza studio drawing identities for companies you have used without once thinking about them. That work teaches you to read a city as a page. A vending machine is set type. A rice bag is a packaging problem somebody solved in the eighties and nobody has improved on since. A good deal of the best design in Japan is like that: already in the street, unsigned, waiting to be looked at properly.

So this magazine watches the street as well as the feed. Around fifty sources come in through the day, ten of them Japanese, and what the world's studios are arguing about is counted and plotted so you can watch it move. Every third day I write about one thing I actually stood in front of.

What you get for a story is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the way out to the people who reported it. Never the article itself, and never the photograph as though it were ours. A story written in Japanese stays in Japanese here, headline and excerpt both, because that is how its author set it down.

Everything is also published in Japanese at hakkenmag.com/ja/.

— Ren Arakawa, Tokyo

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Signal of the week

Packaging: 13 stories in seven days, +8 on the week before.

Gooey Goose — Brand Identity & Packaging Design Packaging of the World

Moonlit Night, La Maison | Mooncake Packaging Packaging of the World

Latest

TypewolfDaylight

TypewolfHeart & Soil

TypewolfDirty Vine

Core77Early Transforming Furniture: Richard Neutra's Camel Table In the 1930s Richard Neutra , the Austrian architect who'd made his home in California, designed an early example of flexible-use furniture.

Core77The UI of a Stencil Machine Just over a century ago, Illinois businessman John W. Marsh launched his Marsh Stencil Machine company.

Core77What an Anodized Aluminum Baseball Cap Holder Says About Our Product Landscape You have to wonder what the pioneers of industrial design would make of this day and age. The original promise of ID was to harness the power of mass production to create useful objects for the…

Creative BloqThe Brand Impact Award Winners 2026 have been revealed! Find out the full list of Gold, Silver and Bronze awards, as well as Best of Show and the Social Impact Award.

BehanceBest Friends

DisegnoThe Crit #43: Alexandra Gerber The Crit , a fortnightly podcast from Disegno , invites designers to pass judgement on their careers to date, sharing both their favourite designs and worst missteps.

My Scandinavian HomeSoft Greens, Golden Tones and a Fairytale Children's Bedroom It's quite incredible what a difference a little colour can make to a home. It doesn't have to be a lot either – sometimes just a splash here and there is enough to completely change the feel of a…

PRINTThe Daily Heller: Typographically Speaking, What Comes Next? The second ITL Fonts & AI Conference is happening online in October at a moment when AI’s existential flame is at a high.

Fast Company DesignAlysa Liu abides by her own fashion rules As a child, Alysa Liu’s identity was bound to her sport. While other kids experimented with fashion to figure out who they were, Liu’s wardrobe was strictly functional from the time she hit the ice…