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

Oslo's grumpiest resident is back – and this time he's singing

10月20日

Two years after its campaign went viral, VisitOSLO and local agency NewsLab are at it again, bringing back their deadpan local for a sequel. Only this time, it's a Christmas horror musical.

News

Creative Boomで読む ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Oslo's grumpiest resident is back – and this time he's singing

Creative Boomの他の記事

Can a trust mark keep your face out of AI? UnitedUs thinks so with its rebrand for Twinnin Creative Boom

How Music founded a football identity on lettering found at London's oldest stadium Creative Boom

Booms & Shakes: October's strategy power moves, Manchester mergers, and why craft is the word of the month Creative Boom

New book In Clubland documents 35 years of rave culture, from acid house to the superclub era Creative Boom

Collins centres Remote's new identity on banknote colours and building blocks Creative Boom

Meet Krea 3: the fast, easy-to-use tool built for editing (not replacing) your work Creative Boom