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

The Dieline

Last Call: Get Your Packaging in Front of the iF DESIGN AWARD 2027 Jury

10月19日

The iF DESIGN AWARD 2027 is accepting entries through November 2, 2026. For packaging designers, studios, and in-house teams, that means YOU STILL HAVE TIME to put a project in front of an…

Packaging Sponsored DIELINE AWARDS iF design award 2027

The Dielineで読む ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Last Call: Get Your Packaging in Front of the iF DESIGN AWARD 2027 Jury

関連する記事

Why the grocery store of the future could have more mini cans and personal packs Fast Company Design

Packaging: The Beemore Rebrand by Boundless Abduzeedo

Pentawards 2026: Living Wine Labels, Keystone Dippers, and 20 Years of Structural Packaging Design Week

STUDIO HERRSTRÖM draws on car culture and carton typography for Milkshake rebrand Design Week

Some Names Just Sound Thick BP&O

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