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

Letterform Archive

Inside Creative Papers

September 21

From the golden age of letterpress to the birth of digital type, our new series of gift-wrap and craft-paper books transform beloved objects from our collection for use in wrapping, crafting…

Craft & material

Read at Letterform Archive ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Inside Creative Papers

Related

“I like to draw pretty things”: Lia Sued C. on trading too much screen-time for tactile illustrations It's Nice That

Ester Pazur on being a 'pessimist', the power of stop-motion and why handmade art still matters Creative Boom

Four handcrafted ceramic vessels in a mirror-silver anniversary box Mindsparkle Mag

Greenspace crafts brand identity for Philip Webb-designed One Palace Green Design Week

Evolving Craft Disegno

Marina Willer crafts letters with light and projection for BFI London Film Festival’s new identity and campaign It's Nice That