Fast Company Design

10 stories

Fast Company DesignAs AI slop floods feeds, luxury brands are going all in on handmade ads In the age of AI , handmade work is becoming radical (and chic), and consumers are taking notice. Prada’s new holiday campaign, Drawing Prada , celebrates craft and process, earning praise on social…

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Fast Company DesignForget Zillow. Vermonters are fighting the housing crisis with catalogs One state is preapproving a whole neighborhood’s worth of home designs in advance, and it’s a step that a growing number of local governments across the U.S. are taking to build more homes—and fast.

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Fast Company DesignHow the Cheesecake Factory won a political food fight In the thick of a heated midterm electoral season, the Cheesecake Factory, of all things, became the latest brand to get sucked into a political food fight against its will.

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Fast Company DesignBrazil’s most popular bank brings its vibrant brand to the U.S. Launching a bank in the U.S. involves layers of super complex compliance, legal requirements, and auditing. For Nubank, a Brazilian-based digital bank that launched in the U.S.

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Fast Company DesignGeneral Mills finally fixed the age-old problem of stale cereal You can finally get Cheerios in a resealable bag. General Mills announced Tuesday it partnered with SC Johnson’s Ziploc brand for Cheerios with Ziploc PantrySeal, its trademarked name for a new bag…

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Fast Company DesignEurope has a weapon to wield against Chinese carmakers: its design history Walk around any city today and try to tell the cars apart. Go ahead, just try. They’re all smooth, rounded, anonymous blobs, shaped by the same wind tunnels and the same cost spreadsheets.

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Fast Company DesignThese people are cutting the clutter and redesigning their smart TVs with AI On a quiet Monday evening, 42-year-old Igor Aguiar decided to give his 75-inch Amazon Fire TV a much-needed—and pointedly pious—facelift.

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Fast Company DesignThese tiny rat backpacks are designed to help find victims in an earthquake All too often rats get a bad rap. They can be vectors of disease, and cities like New York invest heavily in fighting them . But maybe it’s just that we’re not seeing their potential.

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Fast Company DesignThe new Lego x Daft Punk collab makes perfect sense Lego recently announced that Daft Punk, the French electronic duo that split up in 2021, is entering the Lego universe in a partnership that spans “product, content and brand experiences.” What the…

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Fast Company DesignThese tiny trackers were designed to be light enough for a butterfly Researchers track animal movements through tags on their limbs, wings, and shells, but how do you track a creature that weighs less than a gram?

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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