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

Yanko Design

First look of Rockstar Games x Travis Scott x Nike Air Force 1 Low “Grand Theft Auto” in Black dropped

11.03

The most anticipated video game of all time is launching within a few weeks. It’s 19 November, to be precise, when Rockstar Games will release Grand Theft Auto VI, and everyone, including Nike…

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

First look of Rockstar Games x Travis Scott x Nike Air Force 1 Low “Grand Theft Auto” in Black dropped

More from Yanko Design on Hakken

The “Desktop 95” Watch is a love-letter to the greatest Windows OS of all time Yanko Design

This 400-Square-Foot Tiny Cabin Opens Onto a Full-Width Porch Yanko Design

Easy Cooking Stove Concept Folds Its Burner and Pot Supports Into One Case Yanko Design

Razer’s EVANGELION EVA-01 Collection turns your gaming setup into an anime-inspired battle station Yanko Design

Navigation Without Looking Down: Aegis Rider’s AR Helmet Yanko Design

InFocus Drawer Charges Three Devices and Keeps Them Off the Counter Yanko Design