Signal of the week

Packaging · 15 stories, +9 vs last week

Packaging: 15 stories in seven days, +9 on the week before.

JapanWinners of Japan’s 2027 Packaging Design Awards Spoon & Tamago

Aara Turns the Spice Jar Into an Invitation to Indian Cuisine The Dieline

Latest

Creative BloqForget Frame TVs, this e-ink digital art frame is cheaper and nicer to look at The InkPoster Affresco behaves like wall art really should.

September 20

Core77Core77 Weekly Roundup (9-14-26 to 9-18-26) Here's what we looked at this week: An ice cube alternative: Frozen titanium spheres. Chinese cars are now achieving 5-star safety ratings (in Europe, where standards are stricter than in the U.S.).

September 20

Core77A 1973 Fiat Pickup Truck Have you ever wondered what an Italian pickup truck would look like? Well, here's your answer: It's even got a sunroof: Apparently in the 20th century, a handful of Italian motorists with quirky…

September 20

Core77A Minimalist Wheeled Stool That Doesn't Look Like a Wheeled Stool This Allround stool is by industrial designer Hirotaka Tako. It comes with a little surprise: Casters hidden beneath the base. There's also a taller version with a third disc to act as a footrest.

September 20

The NordroomA Yellow Kitchen and Colorful Joinery in a Carefully Restored 1856 Swedish Country House Located above the Kungsbackaån in West Sweden, with forest and greenery outside its windows, this 1856 home has been extensively renovated with respect for its original character.

September 20

Wallpaper*‘Holiday Exotica’ is a visual celebration of the early days of bold and beautiful vacation design Jonny Trunk has a keen eye for casual graphic brilliance. Over a series of volumes collating imagery from the past, what was once dismissed as mere retro-fetishism is revisited and reassessed in the…

September 20

Creative BloqNew Clayface poster gets creepier the more you look at it Artist Orlando Arocena nails visceral illustration.

September 20

DesignboomIGArchitects builds tokyo house from field of structural timber walls forest of timber walls replaces a conventional room sequence House of Wall Forest in Tokyo , Japan , by IGArchitects explores how the spatial clarity and structural presence commonly associated with…

September 20

Casa BrutusJapan【彬子女王のモダン建築めぐり】駐日英国大使館 September 20, 2026 | 彬子女王のモダン建築めぐり | photo_Kenshu Shintsubo text_Princess Akiko of Mikasa 英国・オックスフォード大学大学院で博士号を取得され、美術やデザインへの造詣が深い彬子女王殿下が、明治、大正、昭和初期に建てられたモダン建築をめぐる新連載。

September 20

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: 15 stories in seven days, +9 on the week before.

JapanWinners of Japan’s 2027 Packaging Design Awards Spoon & Tamago

Aara Turns the Spice Jar Into an Invitation to Indian Cuisine The Dieline

Latest

Creative BloqForget Frame TVs, this e-ink digital art frame is cheaper and nicer to look at The InkPoster Affresco behaves like wall art really should.

TypewolfDaylight

TypewolfHeart & Soil

TypewolfDirty Vine

Core77Core77 Weekly Roundup (9-14-26 to 9-18-26) Here's what we looked at this week: An ice cube alternative: Frozen titanium spheres. Chinese cars are now achieving 5-star safety ratings (in Europe, where standards are stricter than in the U.S.).

Core77A 1973 Fiat Pickup Truck Have you ever wondered what an Italian pickup truck would look like? Well, here's your answer: It's even got a sunroof: Apparently in the 20th century, a handful of Italian motorists with quirky…

Core77A Minimalist Wheeled Stool That Doesn't Look Like a Wheeled Stool This Allround stool is by industrial designer Hirotaka Tako. It comes with a little surprise: Casters hidden beneath the base. There's also a taller version with a third disc to act as a footrest.

The NordroomA Yellow Kitchen and Colorful Joinery in a Carefully Restored 1856 Swedish Country House Located above the Kungsbackaån in West Sweden, with forest and greenery outside its windows, this 1856 home has been extensively renovated with respect for its original character.

Creative BloqNew Clayface poster gets creepier the more you look at it Artist Orlando Arocena nails visceral illustration.

DesignboomIGArchitects builds tokyo house from field of structural timber walls forest of timber walls replaces a conventional room sequence House of Wall Forest in Tokyo , Japan , by IGArchitects explores how the spatial clarity and structural presence commonly associated with…