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

PAGE online

Das diesjährige TDC Design ist eine Überraschung!

10.26

Der 73. Type Directors Club hat sein Erscheinungsbild gelauncht. Und was für eins! Es hat nicht nur einen herrlichen Retro-Touch, sondern stammt von dem digitalen Archiv Grafis Nusantara aus Jakarta…

Read at PAGE online ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Das diesjährige TDC Design ist eine Überraschung!

More from PAGE online on Hakken

Was ist der neue Wert von Agenturen? PAGE online

What is real and what is delusion? PAGE online

Data in die Welt tragen: Stefan Sagmeister hat Schuhe gestaltet PAGE online

Once upon today: Mit dem Jubiläums-Kalender von Julie Joliat durch 2027 PAGE online

LinkedIn für Kreative: sichtbar werden, Vertrauen aufbauen, Kund:innen gewinnen PAGE online

Wie ein Film 100 Jahre Kommunikation verbindet PAGE online