Slanted

10 stories

SlantedFrankfurter Buchmesse 2027 Last Thursday, we returned to the Frankfurter Buchmesse, a place where everything revolves around books...

October 16

SlantedSonata Sonata is a display typeface designed by Rosa de Vera that is inspired by musical...

October 15

SlantedRecap: ADC Design Conference 2026 On October 5, the Haus der Wirtschaft in Stuttgart became a meeting point for designers,...

October 14

SlantedFoundry Kingdom Foundry Kingdom is not champagne—it is a pint of bitter in the local pub. It...

October 13

SlantedTypodarium 2027 There is something special about discovering a typeface you have never seen before. A familiar...

October 12

SlantedUnicode Technology Workshop 2026 How do you search for a flamingo emoji in your language? How does software know...

October 9

SlantedMeet HfG Karlsruhe’s New Rector In April 2026, Dr. Andreas Vogel took office as rector of the Karlsruhe University of...

October 8

SlantedPhotodarium 2027 The popular classic Photodarium is now appearing for the 15th time and will delight us...

October 7

Slantedno° | Ice Cream Packaging Designed as a composition, no° transforms layered ice cream into a visual identity where the...

October 6

SlantedAre we cooked?! Are we cooked?! It’s the question every designer is quietly asking right now. So we...

October 2

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