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

Instax Mini Evo 2 Brings Retro Fun Without Giving Up Digital

10.28

One of the things that I’d like to explore more in 2027 is taking more photos of the things around me and the things I’ll be experiencing in the new year.

Heritage & nostalgia

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Instax Mini Evo 2 Brings Retro Fun Without Giving Up Digital

Related

The 100th Anniversary of Mingei: The Beauty of Everyday Life Woven by Kyoto Fonts In Use

J&J Dairy: Heritage You Can Taste Packaging of the World

OHLAB experiments with colour-blocking and cork in old and new buildings of Terreno Barrio Hotel in Mallorca Dezeen Interiors

Toho Bank, 1991 Logo Histories

Dreamy Digital Illustrations by Rebecca Zwanzig Tap into Art History and Nostalgia Colossal

The Gentleman by YSG Studio: A 1929 Potts Point Apartment Built for Two Very Tall People. Yellowtrace