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. More than eighty sources come in through the day, twenty 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

PAGE online

Strategische Kund:innengewinnung für Kreative

11.07

Wie wird LinkedIn zu einem strategischen Werkzeug für neue Geschäftsbeziehungen und Aufträge? Karolina Zolubak zeigt in der zweitägigen Masterclass, wie Profil, Netzwerk und Content zusammenspielen…

Read at PAGE online ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Strategische Kund:innengewinnung für Kreative

More from PAGE online on Hakken

Das wünscht sich die Gaming-Community von Marken PAGE online

»Das System braucht uns, um es am Laufen zu halten« PAGE online

German Brand Award 2027: Jetzt einreichen! PAGE online

Besonderes Gedenken zum Mauerfall: Scholz & Friends für toom Baumarkt PAGE online

KI rechtssicher einsetzen: Noch 4 Plätze frei PAGE online

Auch so kann eine Kampagne für ein Hospiz aussehen! PAGE online