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

Pentagram's design festival identity finds a clever way to give equal billing to Arabic and English

10月19日

Samar Maakaroun's branding for Design Doha Biennial 2026 draws on stretching letterforms to connect the system. Ever designed for a bilingual audience? Let's just say it can be a challenge.

News

Creative Boomで読む ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Pentagram's design festival identity finds a clever way to give equal billing to Arabic and English

Creative Boomの他の記事

David Smalling turns mattresses, pearls and instruments into something unsettling and uneasy Creative Boom

Caroline Tremlett is bringing the Victorian jelly back, one wobble at a time Creative Boom

André Britz draws dimly remembered landscapes, in a book held together with a pink elastic band Creative Boom

How two simple dots gave Pictoplasma a fresh personality for 2026 Creative Boom

Pregnant Then Screwed subverts the conventions of retail design to highlight a vital gender issue Creative Boom