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

Never eaten a whole fish? This beautifully designed magazine will show you how to

11.03

The eclectic magazine from US-based studio Beams creatively curates the words of chefs, fishermen, fishmongers, and scientists. What are they talking about? Fish!

Read at It's Nice That ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Never eaten a whole fish? This beautifully designed magazine will show you how to

More from It's Nice That on Hakken

Welcome to Hot Cottage, the jack of all trades design studio that zigzags between methods and mediums It's Nice That

Why Nothing’s Charlie Smith is doubling down on “joy and wonder” It's Nice That

“Designing a good poster is a dark art” – highlights from this year’s INTL poster competition It's Nice That

Children’s toys don’t need to be an eyesore with Odd Works’ tasteful identity for Toyto It's Nice That

From wax seals to postal stamps, Aplomb perfume’s packaging has the intimacy of a handwritten letter It's Nice That

100 tracks, 100 science projects: jazz-punk band Robocobra Quartet create a new band identity out of mould It's Nice That