Signal of the week

Packaging · 10 stories, +5 vs last week

Packaging: 10 stories in seven days, +5 on the week before.

Rude Olive — Grab-and-Go Olive Snack Packaging Packaging of the World

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

Latest

Creative BloqMcLaren’s new logo looks like a luxury fashion brand It’s a celebration of heritage design.

September 22

Core77Industrial Designer Alberto Essesi's Pen for Precision Sketching This beautiful Exclamation Pen is by industrial designer Alberto Essesi . Both the pen and the rest are made of aluminum with a satin finish.

September 22

Core77The Celluveyor: A Next-Generation Omnidirectional Modular Conveyor Belt Factories, warehouses and distribution centers all use conveyor belts. These are great for moving objects along a single route.

September 22

Core77KAIST Develops a Way to Detect Hidden Cameras Using Your Smartphone As a society, we've accepted that security cameras are everywhere in public. But inside hotel rooms or AirBNBs, we still have an expectation of privacy.

September 22

Creative BloqThis out-there branding is the bravest design I've seen all year The visual identity for 2027 World Design Congress is anything but safe and predictable.

September 22

BRUTUSJapan一つの問いから始まる。雑誌『PARTNERS』の編集美学とは？人と人、あるいは人とモノの関係性にフォーカスした年刊誌『PARTNERS』。これまでに3号を重ね、このたび4号目となる最新号が発売される。特集は「あなたは何を追いかけているの？」。そんな一つの問いかけに対して、異なる分野で活躍する人々から、応答としての写真やテキストの寄稿を募ったアートブック的な雑誌になっている。

September 22

DezeenWith Limitations apartment reveals unvarnished glimpse into life as a London designer A lack of money, materials or equipment shaped every object in this mock apartment, which has taken over the basement of London shop Aram as part of an exhibition by guerrilla design collective…

September 22

DezeenCork wall by GenCork Dezeen Showroom: Portuguese company GenCork combines one of the world's most sustainable natural materials with customisable algorithmically generated design, creating an insulating wall cladding…

September 22

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: 10 stories in seven days, +5 on the week before.

Rude Olive — Grab-and-Go Olive Snack Packaging Packaging of the World

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

Latest

Creative BloqMcLaren’s new logo looks like a luxury fashion brand It’s a celebration of heritage design.

TypewolfDaylight

TypewolfHeart & Soil

TypewolfDirty Vine

Core77Industrial Designer Alberto Essesi's Pen for Precision Sketching This beautiful Exclamation Pen is by industrial designer Alberto Essesi . Both the pen and the rest are made of aluminum with a satin finish.

Core77The Celluveyor: A Next-Generation Omnidirectional Modular Conveyor Belt Factories, warehouses and distribution centers all use conveyor belts. These are great for moving objects along a single route.

Core77KAIST Develops a Way to Detect Hidden Cameras Using Your Smartphone As a society, we've accepted that security cameras are everywhere in public. But inside hotel rooms or AirBNBs, we still have an expectation of privacy.

BehanceBradesco - São João

Creative BloqThis out-there branding is the bravest design I've seen all year The visual identity for 2027 World Design Congress is anything but safe and predictable.

DezeenWith Limitations apartment reveals unvarnished glimpse into life as a London designer A lack of money, materials or equipment shaped every object in this mock apartment, which has taken over the basement of London shop Aram as part of an exhibition by guerrilla design collective…

DezeenCork wall by GenCork Dezeen Showroom: Portuguese company GenCork combines one of the world's most sustainable natural materials with customisable algorithmically generated design, creating an insulating wall cladding…