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 Review

How Fishwife’s illustrated branding made tinned fish cool

September 29

Co-founder Becca Millstein and illustrator Danny Miller reveal how vintage conservas, Winslow Homer watercolours and the films of Wes Anderson fed into the brand’s distinctive…

Illustration

Read at Creative Review ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

How Fishwife’s illustrated branding made tinned fish cool

Related

Illustrator Rosa Snijders finds the softness in grief, debt and all of life's heavy subjects Creative Boom

Illustrations for Resy Behance

Klar Reward Agency brand illustrations Behance

Telstra’s space villains strike back in new network security campaign Creative Review

New photo book celebrates 35 years of clubbing Creative Review

Steve Reeves captures the stories of Britain’s Windrush generation Creative Review