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

Creative Boom

Philip Lindeman builds a slightly haunted Sofia of night shops and stray cats in less than two weeks

October 5

For his new solo show, the Utrecht illustrator invented an entire after-dark city and barely slept in the process. What can an illustrator make in less than a fortnight? Quite a lot, I would imagine.

Illustration News

Read at Creative Boom ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Philip Lindeman builds a slightly haunted Sofia of night shops and stray cats in less than two weeks

Related

Ana Popescu's idyllic illustrations remind us of the warm summer months that have just passed us by Creative Boom

Rui Pu makes graphic illustrations that are direct, a little weird and sure to bring a grin to your face Creative Boom

Louise French quit London, cycled the Andes, and came home an illustrator who gets things done Creative Boom

2026 Booooooom Illustration Awards: Call to Submit Booooooom

Layered Interiors with Hand-Painted Murals in a London Family Home The Nordroom

Sandy Christ crafts fuzzy, out-of-focus illustrations that make you embrace ambiguity It's Nice That