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

Viel Personality & Erfahrung: Auftritt eines Art Directors & Designers

October 7

Wie präsentiert man sich heute als Einzelkämpfer in einer Designwelt, die von Größe und Wachstum geprägt ist?

Read at PAGE online ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Viel Personality & Erfahrung: Auftritt eines Art Directors & Designers

More from PAGE online on Hakken

Wieder da: »KI? Kein Grund zur Panik« – jetzt mit neuem Termin PAGE online

»Why make it easy?« Diese Kampagne setzt lieber auf Auseinandersetzung! PAGE online

»Mit dir«: So klingt erfolgreiches Employer Branding! PAGE online

PAGE x MetaDesign. Mit Leidenschaft für Design seit 40 Jahren. PAGE online

Von der Idee zur Marke mit einem gezielten KI-Workflow in Adobe PAGE online

Natural Born Grillers: Hochburg Design branded Flamid PAGE online