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

ReviCycle | 7-Day Portable Packaging System — HONGLT Brand Desig

September 28

ReviCycle | 7天便携式包装系统 — HONGLT品牌设计 Project Description ReviCycle — 7-Day Portable Packaging System Brand: ReviCycleCategory: Portable Packaging / Gift PackagingService: Brand Packaging Visual…

Packaging

Read at Packaging of the World ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

ReviCycle | 7-Day Portable Packaging System — HONGLT Brand Desig

Related

Feasting & Moon-gazing Box | Packaging & Product Visualization Packaging of the World

ZOMSA MOMO Signature Spicy Sauce Packaging Design Packaging of the World

ONCE UPON A TIME — Photography Studio Packaging Packaging of the World

GAVVA Pets — Holistic Dog Food Branding & Packaging Packaging of the World

Best of the Week: Structural Packaging and Swiss Grids Abduzeedo

Japanキャラメルコーン55周年で11万通りのパッケージ体験、博報堂・杉山ユキ氏が明かすキャラクターへの想い AdverTimes