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

PAGE online

Typed Types: Beim Kaffee umgeben von Füchsen, Hunden & Typografie

September 29

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog: Auf Christoph Niemann folgt jetzt im Café des Ausstellungshauses C/O Berlin eine Installation der Konzeptkünstlerin Ayşe Erkmen, die anhand des berühmten…

Read at PAGE online ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Typed Types: Beim Kaffee umgeben von Füchsen, Hunden & Typografie

More from PAGE online on Hakken

Masterclass »Typographic Branding« mit Henning Skibbe PAGE online

Veränderung ist kein Moment. Sie ist eine Denkweise. PAGE online

Ohne Zucker & in Pastell: Studio Avanti branded Joony’s mit Style & Humor PAGE online

Modulare Brand Identities entwickeln: Webinar mit Patrick Meny PAGE online

Macht KI uns faul? PAGE online

Mit Blick in die Zukunft: Wecatch branded ZOHO PAGE online