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

NOSIGNER

NOSIGNER Leads Branding and Package Design for "UMAMINO," a Sake-Derived Fermented Umami Seasoning

June 19

NOSIGNER has directed the branding and package design for “UMAMINO,” a new fermented umami seasoning derived from Japane...

Packaging プロジェクトリリース

Read at NOSIGNER ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

NOSIGNER Leads Branding and Package Design for "UMAMINO," a Sake-Derived Fermented Umami Seasoning

Related

What kind of design is required in the "age of disaster"? | WHY & HOW by NOSIGNER Vol.01 NOSIGNER

"WAKERS" won the "Better Life" category at the Better Design Award 2025. NOSIGNER

Eisuke Tachikawa will participate in the judging as an ambassador for the TECTURE AWARD 2025. NOSIGNER

Notice of Golden Week Holiday Closing NOSIGNER

An interview with Eisuke Tachikawa has been published in the children’s newspaper “NewsPicks for Kids” NOSIGNER

NOSIGNER is in charge of the rebranding of "CTI JAPAN," one of the origins of coaching in Japan, and its parent company, "Wake Up." NOSIGNER