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

Fonts In Use

Boricua Guerrero: First Combat album art

11.01

Read at Fonts In Use ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Boricua Guerrero: First Combat album art

More from Fonts In Use on Hakken

Citizenship Adventures of the Lollipop Dragon filmstrips Fonts In Use

The Mahavishnu Orchestra with John McLaughlin – The Inner Mounting Flame album art Fonts In Use

Killing Joke – Night Time album art Fonts In Use

Pekka Streng – Kesämaa album art Fonts In Use

Michael Leonhartsberger – “Sometimes We Break” music video Fonts In Use

Dalmares Produce Inc. truck Fonts In Use