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 Review

Mother Design rebrands psychic platform Keen

9月18日

Mother Design has created a new global identity for Keen, an online platform that connects people with spiritual advisors.

Rebrand / refresh

Creative Reviewで読む ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Mother Design rebrands psychic platform Keen

関連する記事

Does Novo Nordisk’s slimmed down rebrand signal a new era of DTC revivalism? Fast Company Design

Marina Willer crafts letters with light and projection for BFI London Film Festival’s new identity and campaign It's Nice That

An Apple alum revamped GM’s truck interface for the screen fatigue era Fast Company Design

What this elegant redesign of a sparkling water brand teaches us about packaging in 2026 Creative Boom

Creative agency Thisaway's rebrand isn't just a lick of new paint: it's a promise to clients Creative Boom

Baby Teeth rebrands Royal Society of Arts with archival system and Dame Judi Dench film Design Week