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. More than eighty sources come in through the day, twenty 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

Type Directors Club

Movement Matters: Variable Fonts’ New Tonal Expressions

02.12

When Type Directors Club asked me to share type design projects I admire, I assumed that focusing on my immediate surroundings would make the task less intimidating.

Typography-led identity Motion & dynamic brands Blog

Read at Type Directors Club ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Movement Matters: Variable Fonts’ New Tonal Expressions

Related

A typeface in four dimensions Typotheque

Improving Zed Display Typotheque

JapanMonotype、柔軟な構造と自然体の温かさをもった欧文書体「Yo Organic Bamboo」を、フォントサービス「Monotype Fonts」「フォントワークス LETS」「FONTPLUS」に追加 Fontworks

Japanフォントサービス「Monotype Fonts」「MyFonts」「フォントワークス LETS」「FONTPLUS」に神田友美の「ミモザ」「コッペ」を追加 Fontworks

Japanフォントサービス「Monotype Fonts」「フォントワークス LETS」「FONTPLUS」にタイプラボの「セプテンバーN」８書体を追加 Fontworks

2025 Adé Hogue, Beatrice Warde, and TDC Scholarships Announced Type Directors Club