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 Review

The inside story of Newcastle United’s new crest design

October 1

CCO Kenneth McIver explains how the club’s evolved identity draws on its history and the city’s heritage while laying the foundations for a more consistent, globally facing…

Read at Creative Review ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

The inside story of Newcastle United’s new crest design

More from Creative Review on Hakken

Washington Post highlights its ‘relentless’ commitment to journalism Creative Review

KFC puts its biggest believers to the test in £50k gameshow Creative Review

Exposure: Vic Lentaigne Creative Review

Intuit introduces new brand identity to bring together its portfolio of products Creative Review

Danish charity Kirkens Korshær launches digital thrift store for gamers Creative Review

How Fishwife’s illustrated branding made tinned fish cool Creative Review