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

Wie Marken trotz vieler Kanäle konsistent bleiben

September 22

Am 03. & 04.12. lernt ihr von unserer Expertin Bettina Knoth, wie ihr Markenwerte, Unternehmensidentität und Kundenbedürfnisse in Einklang bringt – und Brand Strategy & Brand Design endlich richtig…

Read at PAGE online ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Wie Marken trotz vieler Kanäle konsistent bleiben

More from PAGE online on Hakken

KI-Crawler: So schützt ihr eure Webseite vor Data-Scraping PAGE online

Wir machen vorwärts: Strichpunkt Identity begleitet die BKW in die Zukunft PAGE online

Charaktere in Midjourney erstellen: Webinar mit Jeannette Bergen PAGE online

30 Tage Spatial UX für die Apple Vision Pro PAGE online

Diese Arbeiten haben bei den World Illustration Awards 2026 gewonnen! PAGE online

Provinzial erfindet den Schutzengel neu und das ist besonders schön erzählt! PAGE online