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 Archive

It's Nice That

10 of the most bizarre films and their posters, as chosen by Eternal Family

October 15

Eternal Family is a movie streaming app like no other. From Indian comedy-horrors to Filipino rip-offs of E.T, the app collects the kookiest curios of alternative cinema.

Read at It's Nice That ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

10 of the most bizarre films and their posters, as chosen by Eternal Family

More from It's Nice That on Hakken

On’s new editorial platform is where the brand’s ideas spark, meld and grow It's Nice That

Sewell Killingstad on why making “art for art’s sake” lands you the briefs you love It's Nice That

Design with abandon! Núria Balinha’s zines are the result of working without inhibitions It's Nice That

Andrej & Andrej gives Pohoda Festival an identity refresh, complete with 3D babies and a futuristic typeface It's Nice That

Atelier Bingo puts its own spin on a ten-year-old Tuscan wine It's Nice That

“Less bank, more life”: Barkas gives Nigerian digital bank Kuda an identity with the pace of Lagos It's Nice That