Colossal

5 stories

ColossalRobin F. Williams Suspends the Allure and Horror of Technology in an Endless Loop A nude figure with frazzled hair lies in bed, the sickly colored linens draped across their upper body.

10.16

ColossalThe Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026 Winners Showcase Nature’s Power and Vulnerability Federico Veronesi received the top honor of the 2026 Wildlife Photographer of the Year for his poignant black-and-white image of a female elephant carrying her deceased calf.

10.15

ColossalAnn Toebbe’s Skewed Paintings Transform Architectural Spaces into Cherished Places “I find that when I work from my emotions and experiences, I make a more powerful image,” Ann Toebbe writes.

10.14

Colossal221 Camera Obscuras Fill Pneuhaus’ Immersive, Inflatable, Image-Capturing Installation At first glance, the structure resembles a kind of elongated igloo or a giant, white snail. One one hand, it’s an immersive, pop-up room with a futuristic, bubble-like texture.

10.13

ColossalMeet the Lap Easel, a Portable Companion for Taking Creativity Anywhere From birch plywood and select solid maple, birch, cherry, and other native hardwoods, Chicago maker and designer Bill Groot crafts handmade Lap Easels in small batches.

10.13

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