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

Can someone do an impression of your brand?

September 21

Dior and A24's new short, which sees various actors performing as designer Jonathan Anderson, points to a test of distinctiveness: whether people understand your character well enough to see it…

Read at Creative Review ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Can someone do an impression of your brand?

More from Creative Review on Hakken

Mikai Karl on bringing Beck’s cinematic world to life Creative Review

Mother Design rebrands psychic platform Keen Creative Review

New ad shows a minute in the life of Senegalese brand Kirène Creative Review

Why mythology matters for luxury brands Creative Review

Illustrator Mason London puts playful spin on Guinness archive Creative Review

People Like Us exposes the inequality of automated hiring processes Creative Review