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 Boom

Ellie Campbell turns club nights into hand-painted, gloriously wonky animations

October 1

Growing up in Weston-super-Mare, the artist found an escape in cartoons and animation. Now, she's turning that lifelong obsession into painstakingly painted rotoscoped works that are full of life and…

Motion & dynamic brands Work

Read at Creative Boom ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Ellie Campbell turns club nights into hand-painted, gloriously wonky animations

Related

The strongest motion identities encode behaviour, not aesthetics Design Week

Why motion is now an essential part of brand identity Creative Review

Templo’s visual identity for DeafCity Hub is a fusion of creative coding, British sign language and gestural motion capture It's Nice That

Isabel + Helen showcase their "obsession with movement" with kinetic models at The Conran Shop Dezeen Interiors

ARKEN's identity system runs on 80s signage and binary motion Mindsparkle Mag

Poltrona Frau | Vanity Fair XC In Motion Colour Hive