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. More than eighty sources come in through the day, twenty 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

New book pays homage to the overlooked craft of bookplates

11月4日

In his latest book, Tim Sumner explores the ancient design practice, and reveals the many gems in his personal collection

Craft & material featured

Creative Reviewで読む ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

New book pays homage to the overlooked craft of bookplates

関連する記事

Swiss Typefaces crafts a warmer, friendlier custom font for Swiss Post Creative Boom

A foiled moon on a fading night sky wraps LA MAISON's vegan mooncakes Mindsparkle Mag

As AI slop floods feeds, luxury brands are going all in on handmade ads Fast Company Design

Original BTC’s new portable lamp celebrates British ceramic craft Icon

OurCreative. crafts standalone brand identity for Asda’s Asquith 1965 range Design Week

A high-end historic renovation with custom woodwork Coco Lapine Design