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

Asking which typeface DeafCity Hub used for its logo is entirely the wrong question

September 16

Templo took a highly original approach to branding a new cultural space for the deaf community, taking inspiration from the community itself.

Typography-led identity News

Read at Creative Boom ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Asking which typeface DeafCity Hub used for its logo is entirely the wrong question

Related

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

No fonts on a dead planet: a website case study Design Week

La bonne typographie est-elle devenue un luxe ? Étapes

Brands cannot afford to speak in the same voice as countless others right now. Typeface designers can help. Design Observer

Canva launches ProSuite bringing Affinity, Cavalry, Flourish and Leonardo together with more than 100 new features Creative Boom

The eyes have it: how we're bringing Creative Boom's mascot to life in different time zones Creative Boom