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

Mindsparkle Mag

P.A.C. bakery's identity turns a receipt printer into a design tool

10月15日

P.A.C. is a São Paulo bakery that started as an experiment in almost every sense. Its founders had no professional kitchen experience, only a growing obsession with bread, an active sourdough starter…

Mindsparkle Magで読む ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

P.A.C. bakery's identity turns a receipt printer into a design tool

Mindsparkle Magの他の記事

Kalok Yeung Mindsparkle Mag

Growth rings and dappled light give Little Green Rooms its headspace Mindsparkle Mag

Think Company's identity pairs bold red Bagoss type with an AI agent Mindsparkle Mag

Betr's gaming super app now runs on one question: You In? Mindsparkle Mag

Oraio's soy sauce identity reads like a wine estate's cellar label Mindsparkle Mag

Sapiens borrows newspaper type to give indigenous stories a modern voice Mindsparkle Mag