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

Fast Company Design

The midterms’ biggest branding trend? Centrism

11.03

When Griffin Glaze, a graphic designer, got the job to design James Talarico’s campaign branding , she had just 10 days to do it. Talarico, a Texan who is running for a seat in the U.S.

Read at Fast Company Design ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

The midterms’ biggest branding trend? Centrism

More from Fast Company Design on Hakken

Starbucks is spending $1 billion to undo its biggest mistake Fast Company Design

How Fanatics and the NHL used cryptic marketing to hype 32 new special-edition jerseys Fast Company Design

As AI slop floods feeds, luxury brands are going all in on handmade ads Fast Company Design

Forget Zillow. Vermonters are fighting the housing crisis with catalogs Fast Company Design

How the Cheesecake Factory won a political food fight Fast Company Design

Brazil’s most popular bank brings its vibrant brand to the U.S. Fast Company Design