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

Mindsparkle Mag

Grids returns as an interactive lesson in composition and visual tension

September 30

Obys has released Season 03 of its Design Education Series, returning to the subject that started the whole thing.

Read at Mindsparkle Mag ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Grids returns as an interactive lesson in composition and visual tension

More from Mindsparkle Mag on Hakken

Kester Black's beauty packaging gives every lipstick shade its own shape Mindsparkle Mag

Olympic's maritime identity turns on a ring that never quite closes Mindsparkle Mag

Pardon my French: a bakery identity built on gingham and wry one-liners Mindsparkle Mag

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

Berto dresses a Montreal osteria in oxblood, cursive and a looping monogram Mindsparkle Mag

These cocktail recipe packs hide a gradient behind a die-cut olive Mindsparkle Mag