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

It's Nice That

Mucho reaches beyond Silicon Valley with the branding for Biotic, the organisation behind breakthrough biology

October 8

Boundary-pushing science is often difficult to understand, that’s where clear and accessible brand design often comes in to help.

Read at It's Nice That ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Mucho reaches beyond Silicon Valley with the branding for Biotic, the organisation behind breakthrough biology

More from It's Nice That on Hakken

Immersive, layered and abstract, William Goldsmith’s comics explore memory and “the strange patterns that shape it” It's Nice That

Depop’s Steve Dool on how to build a brand with a strong sense of self It's Nice That

Sergio Membrillas on treading the path between two disciplines and taking yourself seriously as an art director It's Nice That

Perfection, begone! Laura Pappa and Tüpokompanii’s new typeface is all about letting yourself be bad at something It's Nice That

How Love And Money designed the identity and tiny typeface for Tame Impala’s synthesiser brand, Orchid It's Nice That

Inside New Bahru: The 1960s Singapore high school turned creative business incubator, where design is the priority It's Nice That