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 Bloq

The ambitious EA Sports rebrand looks great from every angle

10.23

Brand check: DixonBaxi have released their superb rebranding of EAFC27 – a work blending iconic branding with sports and gaming culture.

Rebrand / refresh

Read at Creative Bloq ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

The ambitious EA Sports rebrand looks great from every angle

Related

Apple Music's splashy new logo is gorgeous – so why isn't the new app icon? Creative Bloq

How a Humble Clay Pot Redesigns the Ritual of Eating Design Milk

Apple Music's new logo was shaped by Fred Again and a bath of mineral oil Creative Boom

From Creative Boom's Instagram to a full rebrand: How Davy Denduyver met A Human Agency Creative Boom

Can a trust mark keep your face out of AI? UnitedUs thinks so with its rebrand for Twinnin Creative Boom

Smart, lebensnah & digital: wirDesign redesignt HUK24 PAGE online