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

Packaging of the World

Oval Oak Wine Case — Single-Bottle Presentation Box, Natural Oak

10.19

Some bottles deserve to be displayed rather than stored. This single-bottle wine case, designed and manufactured by TANCY BOX, treats the bottle as an object to be shown: an upright, egg-shaped form…

Packaging

Read at Packaging of the World ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Oval Oak Wine Case — Single-Bottle Presentation Box, Natural Oak

Related

Thèrapeau Packaging of the World

Fibre-based packaging concept serves alcohol-free beer for every weekday Packaging Europe

Packaging: The Beemore Rebrand by Boundless Abduzeedo

Pentawards 2026: Living Wine Labels, Keystone Dippers, and 20 Years of Structural Packaging Design Week

Cazcabel Tequila unveils new bottle for Blanco and Reposado Packaging Europe

Bill Rebholz Brings His Distinct Illustration Style to the World of CPG The Dieline