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

Packaging of the World

rARTISAN

10月28日

rARTISAN | Material in motion 🍃 At Avery Dennison’s request, we designed a label to showcase the aesthetic and technical qualities of rARTISAN, a premium paper made from 100% recycled fibres.

Craft & material

Packaging of the Worldで読む ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

rARTISAN

関連する記事

Inside the Craft of Woven Whisky Branding by Freytag Anderson Abduzeedo

Japanアート・クラフト・フードが集う「SUPER ART & CRAFT MARKET 2026」が、東京ミッドタウン日比谷で開催 Japan Design Net

Japanスポーツと工芸の、いい関係。〈LOEWE〉のバックパック：Brutus Best Bets BRUTUS

A Douglas Fir Extension Wraps Around an Arts and Crafts House in Petersfield The Nordroom

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

How Florian Cornut Crafted Graphic Design for Shapes & Forms Abduzeedo