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

Why Studio Playground asked a kidswear brand to design its team uniform

9月30日

The European publisher teamed up with Oxox Club on a limited-edition workwear set that swaps conformity for freedom.

Work

Creative Boomで読む ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Why Studio Playground asked a kidswear brand to design its team uniform

Creative Boomの他の記事

Derek&Eric's olive oil identity swaps Tuscan cliches for attitude and colour Creative Boom

This packaging for ready-made dinners can teach you to cook better Creative Boom

Louise French quit London, cycled the Andes, and came home an illustrator who gets things done Creative Boom

Listen to Jordic: The unlikely heart warning men need to hear Creative Boom

Why a laundry brand made four T-shirts you're not supposed to wash Creative Boom

Faith In Nature turns a '90s rave anthem into 'Bees R Good' for its first-ever TV ad Creative Boom