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

BP&O

DNCO creates Vermont’s first dedicated consumer tourism brand, aiming to “turn affection into action”

10月15日

I’m sure I can’t be alone as someone (albeit someone from England) who would be utterly incapable of pointing to the whereabouts of Vermont on a map – and perhaps, like me, unsure as to whether it…

BP&Oで読む ↗

BP&Oの他の記事

Kneading East and West BP&O

Order creates a delightfully design history-steeped identity for Salt Lick on Salt Creek – but what actually is it? BP&O

All Purpose’s identity for Two Tribes Brewing is resolutely ‘craft’, while also turning its back on all which that signifies BP&O

Pizza With A Side Of Therapy BP&O

Koto’s new branding for restaurant discovery app Franki feels lively, thoroughly human, and just the right amount of cute BP&O

Vrints-Kolsteren’s gorgeous identity for pizza restaurant Napoli on the Road brings a little mischief to minimalism BP&O

BP&Oの他の記事

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

DNCO creates Vermont’s first dedicated consumer tourism brand, aiming to “turn affection into action”

BP&Oの他の記事

Kneading East and West BP&O

Order creates a delightfully design history-steeped identity for Salt Lick on Salt Creek – but what actually is it? BP&O

All Purpose’s identity for Two Tribes Brewing is resolutely ‘craft’, while also turning its back on all which that signifies BP&O

Pizza With A Side Of Therapy BP&O

Koto’s new branding for restaurant discovery app Franki feels lively, thoroughly human, and just the right amount of cute BP&O

Vrints-Kolsteren’s gorgeous identity for pizza restaurant Napoli on the Road brings a little mischief to minimalism BP&O