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

← Hakken 週ごとのアーカイブ

Creative Boom

Are you getting ghosted more than ever? You're not alone!

9月16日

It's not about you; it's about a broken business culture. Our latest Dear Boom dilemma looks at how to tackle ghosting from clients.

Dear Boom

Creative Boomで読む ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Are you getting ghosted more than ever? You're not alone!

Creative Boomの他の記事

Why a Belfast band used 100 dishes of mould to make their album cover Creative Boom

Asking which typeface DeafCity Hub used for its logo is entirely the wrong question Creative Boom

Canva launches ProSuite bringing Affinity, Cavalry, Flourish and Leonardo together with more than new 100 features Creative Boom

The eyes have it: How we're bringing Creative Boom's mascot to life in different time zones Creative Boom

How Marie-Lou Garcia turns holidays, friendships and quiet days into serene illustrations Creative Boom

Saehan Parc wants her illustrations to inspire others to draw, too Creative Boom