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

The Dieline

ImaginaryFriend Gives MATCHALITA’s Matcha a Nightlife Ready Makeover

October 2

MATCHALITA brings matcha into the world of music and nightlife with packaging by ImaginaryFriend that pairs Japanese visual references with electric color and a waveform inspired graphic language.

Japan-inspired

Read at The Dieline ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

ImaginaryFriend Gives MATCHALITA’s Matcha a Nightlife Ready Makeover

Related

Shibuya is changing – but in Tokyo’s trend capital, disruption is the only constant Monocle

A Warsaw Law Office Finds Common Ground Between Japan and New York Design Milk

Typeface Design: PP Kyoto by Pangram Pangram Abduzeedo

Rezen transforms hotel stables in Australia into "raw and direct" wellness centre Dezeen Interiors

I IN contrasts concrete architecture with bright colours in Andersson Bell Tokyo store Dezeen Interiors

Nonna’s and Lucali Collab To Bring Pizzeria Style to Hot EVOO The Dieline