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

A Ntsal identity uses the nonlinear timeline of films to inspire its expressive and compressive motion

September 15

The Cairo-based studio gives the film festival’s 18th edition a custom typeface and a shifting visual language that echoes the way events interlink across a narrative.

Motion & dynamic brands

Read at It's Nice That ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

A Ntsal identity uses the nonlinear timeline of films to inspire its expressive and compressive motion

Related

Poltrona Frau | Vanity Fair XC In Motion Colour Hive

Thonik’s identity for Orkest Phion gives the symphony orchestra a brand that’s as ever-changing and itinerant as its programme BP&O

Hunter Harvey’s “text paintings” are graphic parodies where the typeface is the main character It's Nice That

The mascots, design and visual history of Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that puts functionality above aesthetics It's Nice That