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

BP&O

Playing With Your Food

September 30

Packaging expert Lisa Cain shares her opinion on Center’s branding for meal company Riff.

Read at BP&O ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Playing With Your Food

More from BP&O on Hakken

JKR’s Tropical Smoothie Cafe rebrand is deliciously on the nose, and all the better for it BP&O

Ragged Edge creates refreshingly wholesome identity for AI notepad Granola BP&O

Some Names Just Sound Thick BP&O

Pentagram New York’s surprisingly joyful brand identity for Mozilla editorial platform Nothing Personal BP&O

Wedge’s Bastét toothpaste brand design makes absolutely no sense for its category – and perhaps that’s what makes it so utterly gorgeous BP&O

Design That Stirs BP&O