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

Design Week

Derek&Eric bring bright colours and funky typography to the launch of DRZZL

October 5

I’m not entirely sure what my Mum in Spain would think if I were to turn up and ask here what she thought of olive oil in a squeezy bottle.

Typography-led identity

Read at Design Week ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Derek&Eric bring bright colours and funky typography to the launch of DRZZL

Related

Mix Interiors Brand Identity Is a Masterclass by Marçal Prats Abduzeedo

Best of the Week: Monograms, Serifs, and Tactile Systems Abduzeedo

Swirls, beads and Art Nouveau roots: Emily Klaebe on type design as world building It's Nice That

Horah Inc lets its love for Pokémon and typography soar in identities for spiced rum, trading cards and book design It's Nice That

Corsario, the editorial serif that redraws itself for every point size Mindsparkle Mag

Jessica Hische turns her hand-made lettering into emotional first aid for kids Creative Boom