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 Boom

Wu Xinlin's editorial illustrations show solitude in a whole new light

September 23

The Chinese illustrator's personal series highlights how being alone is never as simple as it looks. Humans are social animals, and so in our cultural imagination, we tend to bracket solitude with…

Illustration Work

Read at Creative Boom ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Wu Xinlin's editorial illustrations show solitude in a whole new light

Related

Love is the way Behance

“I like to draw pretty things”: Lia Sued C. on trading too much screen-time for tactile illustrations It's Nice That

Editorial illustrations for The Economist Behance

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

Why designer Merijn Straathof turned a landmark techno album into a playable web-based instrument Creative Boom

From YWCA to Hotel Willo: how Rethink solved one of branding's trickiest problems Creative Boom