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

Communication Arts

Last Call: CA’s Typography Competition Closes Tonight!

September 18

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to enter Communication Arts’ 2027 Typography competition! Submit your best typographic work before the clock strikes midnight tonight!

Typography-led identity Message

Read at Communication Arts ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Last Call: CA’s Typography Competition Closes Tonight!

Related

Typography Design: Mira Display by Mira Mayne Abduzeedo

Asking which typeface DeafCity Hub used for its logo is entirely the wrong question Creative Boom

Typography: Pilot Typeface by Violaine & Jeremy Abduzeedo

Brutalist Typography: SL24 by Kseniya Artman Abduzeedo

Hunter Harvey’s “text paintings” are graphic parodies where the typeface is the main character It's Nice That

No fonts on a dead planet: a website case study Design Week