Booooooom

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Booooooom2026 Booooooom Illustration Awards: Meet The Judges We’ve got cold hard cash up for grabs, prizes from BenQ , True Grit Texture Supply , and Clip Studio Paint , and oh yes, we’ve assembled another killer panel of guest judges to help us celebrate the…

10.30

Booooooom“Aesthetic of After” by Photographer Junya Suzuki Junya Suzuki Junya Suzuki’s Website Junya Suzuki on Instagram

10.30

Booooooom“Veil” by Photographer Jennilee Marigomen Jennilee Marigomen Jennilee Marigomen’s Website Jennilee Marigomen on Instagram

10.29

BooooooomArtist Spotlight: Alina-Ondine Slimovschi Alina-Ondine Slimovschi Alina-Ondine Slimovschi’s Website Alina-Ondine Slimovschi on Instagram

10.28

Booooooom“Proof Without Claim” by Photographer Benjamin Jossinet Benjamin Jossinet Benjamin Jossinet’s Website Benjamin Jossinet on Instagrm

10.27

BooooooomArtist Spotlight: Michelle Ramin Michelle Ramin Michelle Ramin’s Website Michelle Ramin on Instagram

10.26

Booooooom“Marvelous Problems” by Artist Emanuela Lekić Emanuela Lekić Emanuela Lekić on Instagram

10.23

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