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

Creative Boom

As Thought Bubble comic art festival turns 20, meet the indie creators who could be the next big thing

10.22

The organisers of the Yorkshire event pick the fresh names you shouldn't miss this year. By definition, the big names in the creative world are few in number, and so we naturally tend to venerate…

Illustration News

Read at Creative Boom ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

As Thought Bubble comic art festival turns 20, meet the indie creators who could be the next big thing

Related

Bill Rebholz Brings His Distinct Illustration Style to the World of CPG The Dieline

Illustrator Spotlight: Yue Zhang Booooooom

Illustrations for Resy Behance

Klar Reward Agency brand illustrations Behance

Why is a creative agency in New York asking women to 'send nudes'? Creative Boom

SEA turns 30 with a new anniversary book celebrating design that lasts Creative Boom