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

Charlotte Fox on painting the space between 'desire, repulsion, connection and fantasy'

9月21日

The illustrator finds beauty and humour in everyday life, with an aim to elicit some feelings from the narratives created in her work.

Work

Creative Boomで読む ↗

Creative Boomの他の記事

The best new fonts for September 2026 Creative Boom

Sequins in sitting rooms: why photographer Debby Besford puts skating champions in domestic settings Creative Boom

A billboard of signed school leavers' shirts has appeared in London, and the messages aren't what you'd expect Creative Boom

Clara Biel turns laundromats, pool halls and supermarkets into reminders to slow down Creative Boom

Inside Qiaoyu Liao's Suuugar!, the clay-animated cheesecake disaster that shows what happens when you get distracted Creative Boom

How Rob Farmer turns half-baked sketches into New York Times covers Creative Boom

Creative Boomの他の記事

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Charlotte Fox on painting the space between 'desire, repulsion, connection and fantasy'

Creative Boomの他の記事

The best new fonts for September 2026 Creative Boom

Sequins in sitting rooms: why photographer Debby Besford puts skating champions in domestic settings Creative Boom

A billboard of signed school leavers' shirts has appeared in London, and the messages aren't what you'd expect Creative Boom

Clara Biel turns laundromats, pool halls and supermarkets into reminders to slow down Creative Boom

Inside Qiaoyu Liao's Suuugar!, the clay-animated cheesecake disaster that shows what happens when you get distracted Creative Boom

How Rob Farmer turns half-baked sketches into New York Times covers Creative Boom