Fast Company Design

4 stories

Fast Company DesignArsenal’s new blackletter font is a tribute to a star player Arsenal’s new gothic font is a modern take on black letter. It’s part of a larger multi-font branding strategy for the 140-year-old English football club.

10.17

Fast Company DesignTrump’s new ‘superintelligence’ website is a rebrand fail President Donald Trump’s push to rebrand artificial intelligence as “superintelligence” has a new government URL.

10.15

Fast Company DesignThis pretty speaker is made from old melted Barbies Your old Barbies could be turned into speakers, power banks, and more. Gomi, a sustainable U.K. design studio, put out a call for old Barbie dolls for its Childhood Memories Collection , a new…

10.14

Fast Company DesignGraphic design isn’t dying. It’s expanding It’s a liberating time to be a graphic designer. You would think so, anyway, after reading Jarrett Fuller’s new book, Graphic Designers After Graphic Design , published this fall by Princeton…

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