Designboom

3 stories

Designboomdesignboom listens: what does space sound like to kengo kuma? kengo kuma on music as a source of architectural inspiration For Japanese architect Kengo Kuma , music is closely tied to the way he thinks about space.

10.20

Designboomborosilicate drinking glass creates optical illusion of liquid melting into table outward-rounded glass base creates subtle optical distortion Designed by Federico Fontanella for Milan-based brand TRAGA, the Melt Glass reinterprets the standard drinking glass through subtle…

10.19

Designboomunified by honeycomb geometry, maxon one’s brand identity unfolds through motion design MODULAR LOGO SYSTEM UNIFIES MAXON’S CREATIVE SOFTWARE layout Motion designer Casey Gu creates the Maxon One Brand Expression Film to introduce a unified visual identity across Maxon’s suite of…

10.19

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