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

BP&O

Pentagram New York’s surprisingly joyful brand identity for Mozilla editorial platform Nothing Personal

9月22日

If you’ve heard of Mozilla, it’s probably thanks to Firefox, the search engine perhaps most famous for its dedication to the more utopian ideals of the internet – things like remaining an independent…

BP&Oで読む ↗

BP&Oの他の記事

Wedge’s Bastét toothpaste brand design makes absolutely no sense for its category – and perhaps that’s what makes it so utterly gorgeous BP&O

Design That Stirs BP&O

Mother Design gives psychic platform Keen a 90s New Age sensibility for the digital age – and it works beautifully BP&O

Studio South merges rigour and ridiculousness in the best way possible in its superb identity for noodle joint Oodles BP&O

Oral Care Shelves…Where Good Design Usually Goes To Die BP&O

Mucca makes New York supermarket company Fairway’s everyday essentials anything but basic BP&O

BP&Oの他の記事

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Pentagram New York’s surprisingly joyful brand identity for Mozilla editorial platform Nothing Personal

BP&Oの他の記事

Wedge’s Bastét toothpaste brand design makes absolutely no sense for its category – and perhaps that’s what makes it so utterly gorgeous BP&O

Design That Stirs BP&O

Mother Design gives psychic platform Keen a 90s New Age sensibility for the digital age – and it works beautifully BP&O

Studio South merges rigour and ridiculousness in the best way possible in its superb identity for noodle joint Oodles BP&O

Oral Care Shelves…Where Good Design Usually Goes To Die BP&O

Mucca makes New York supermarket company Fairway’s everyday essentials anything but basic BP&O