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

Design Week

Oh, Apple Music has a new logo. We talk with Curtis Free about why the making matters more in an AI world.

10.24

Apple Music have released their new identity. It’s quite interesting. In the video above, you can see how they’ve crafted it using an oil bath, clever lighting, a transducer, and a lot of…

AI in design Rebrand / refresh

Read at Design Week ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Oh, Apple Music has a new logo. We talk with Curtis Free about why the making matters more in an AI world.

Related

Can a trust mark keep your face out of AI? UnitedUs thinks so with its rebrand for Twinnin Creative Boom

STUDIO HERRSTRÖM draws on car culture and carton typography for Milkshake rebrand Design Week

Apple Music's new logo was shaped by Fred Again and a bath of mineral oil Creative Boom

How AI has exposed the cracks in the creative industry Creative Review

From Creative Boom's Instagram to a full rebrand: How Davy Denduyver met A Human Agency Creative Boom

Digital bank Kuda targets young Nigerians with new rebrand Creative Review