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

LEGO’s Joker Wall Art feels like a brilliantly psychotic Batman comic cover come to life

October 6

LEGO has taken one of the Joker’s most unsettling comic-book images and turned it into something I could actually imagine putting on a wall.

Illustration

Read at Yanko Design ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

LEGO’s Joker Wall Art feels like a brilliantly psychotic Batman comic cover come to life

Related

Lonely Kids Club x Kayla Reay: Clive the Cyclist Illustration Abduzeedo

E.H. Shepard at 100: The Craft of Winnie-the-Pooh Illustration Abduzeedo

2026 Booooooom Illustration Awards: Call to Submit Booooooom

Layered Interiors with Hand-Painted Murals in a London Family Home The Nordroom

Sandy Christ crafts fuzzy, out-of-focus illustrations that make you embrace ambiguity It's Nice That

Rui Pu makes graphic illustrations that are direct, a little weird and sure to bring a grin to your face Creative Boom