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

The Dieline

Criterium Gives Vanilla Extract the Look of Old Quebec Currency

October 12

Criterium gives vanilla extract an unexpectedly rich identity through dense typography inspired by old Quebec signage, apothecaries and coin engravings.

Read at The Dieline ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Criterium Gives Vanilla Extract the Look of Old Quebec Currency

More from The Dieline on Hakken

Tanica and Its Distinctly Australian Aperitif Packaging The Dieline

Shelf Life 131: Frozen Meals Are Getting Better And Here’s Why The Dieline

White Bear Goes 100% Bananas for Banana Water With Banam The Dieline

Contrast Serves Up a Fresh Slice of Italy for Sainsbury’s The Dieline

Biotamra Brings Tasty Tales From the Sahara Right to the Pantry The Dieline

ArtCraft Launches an Open-Source, AI-Powered Alternative to Adobe’s Creative Cloud The Dieline