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

It's Nice That

“You’ve already proof-tested the answer for years”

10.19

Does working in the creative industry without a creative degree impact your validation, self-worth or creative fulfilment?

Work

Read at It's Nice That ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

“You’ve already proof-tested the answer for years”

More from It's Nice That on Hakken

Fulham F.C gets a brand refresh built on hand-rendered lettering found on the walls of its stadium It's Nice That

Design disasters or creative solutions? The self-made paper signs replacing wayfinding in Singapore’s railway stations It's Nice That

Source Type’s Dictionary of the Illegible explores what happens when typography stops making sense It's Nice That

Nicer Tuesdays London: Get tickets for Yinka Ilori, Daryn and Wonderhood Studios in November! It's Nice That

Nicer Tuesdays LA: Get tickets for Debbie Millman, Micaiah Carter and Bijou Karman in November! It's Nice That