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

Heart of Glass: why Venice is once more the centre of the glassmaking world

9月28日

The Floating City celebrates the unique creative world of glass – be it forged, blown, molten, opaque, clear, crystal, heavy or light, worn, hung, mounted, displayed, shimmering, illuminated, or…

News

Creative Boomで読む ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Heart of Glass: why Venice is once more the centre of the glassmaking world

Creative Boomの他の記事

Beauty brands were writing slop before AI: here's how Uncommon won a D&AD Black Pencil for calling it out Creative Boom

Bentley and FutureBrand rethink the car showroom as a place you'd actually want to linger Creative Boom

Jessica Hische turns her hand-made lettering into emotional first aid for kids Creative Boom

MOKSi gives GiftTrees the confidence to be both good and profitable Creative Boom

Design Bridge and Partners turns Leone's Turin sweet factory into a Willy Wonka world Creative Boom

Illustrator Rosa Snijders finds the softness in grief, debt and all of life's heavy subjects Creative Boom