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

The Dieline

Substance Gives Oraio Soy Sauce the Fine Wine Treatment

10.21

Designed by Substance, Oraio’s soy sauce packaging brings the elegance of fine wine to an artisanal condiment produced at Belgium’s Domaine La Falize.

Packaging Craft & material Food Packaging amber glass bottles artisanal food production artisanal soy sauce

Read at The Dieline ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Substance Gives Oraio Soy Sauce the Fine Wine Treatment

Related

Ambijus: Inside OlssønBarbieri Packaging Design Abduzeedo

Almighty Puts a Smile on Skincare With Rocco The Dieline

New Research Finds Loads Of Microplastics In Your Morning Tea The Dieline

Blank Body Makes a Case for Showing Some Skin The Dieline

Sweety & Co. Makes a Splash With Possible’s Plant Milk Refresh The Dieline

Kevin Marshall, Senior Director of Packaging at Microsoft, Explains Why They Embraced Inclusive Packaging The Dieline