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 Review

Born Social on the power of creators in the AI age

September 24

As the social-first agency expands into the US, CCO Paddy Smith reflects on the current trends in social and how investing in human creativity is a way to bring authenticity and distinction to…

AI in design

Read at Creative Review ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Born Social on the power of creators in the AI age

Related

Kanana Brand Identity Refresh Behance

The Daily Heller: Typographically Speaking, What Comes Next? PRINT

Booms & Shakes: September's biggest hires, bold bets on AI, and design overtakes retail Creative Boom

Decision paralysis, lost conviction and no juniors: what brand creative leaders say AI is exposing Creative Boom

The Daily Heller: When AI ‘Agents’ Go Rogue … PRINT

Digital Camouflage Design Indaba