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

Mindsparkle Mag

A foiled moon on a fading night sky wraps LA MAISON's vegan mooncakes

10.31

For the Mid-Autumn Festival, LA MAISON presents a collection of vegan mooncakes as a thank-you to its guests and loyal customers.

Craft & material

Read at Mindsparkle Mag ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

A foiled moon on a fading night sky wraps LA MAISON's vegan mooncakes

Related

Copper-clad Maserati GranTurismo brings handcrafted luxury + gullwing doors to a bespoke grand tourer Yanko Design

As AI slop floods feeds, luxury brands are going all in on handmade ads Fast Company Design

JapanCanvaが独自の画像生成AI「Craft」を公開、構図を設計してから画像を生成 Web Designing

Peter Pincus Produced 149 Unique, Complementary Ceramic Vessels for Glenmorangie 50 Years Old Surface

Original BTC’s new portable lamp celebrates British ceramic craft Icon

How Matúš Hnát Crafted Book Design for Lucky Star 3rd Ed. Abduzeedo