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

How Music founded a football identity on lettering found at London's oldest stadium

10.20

Manchester agency Music and type foundry F37 turn hand-rendered lettering at Craven Cottage into a bespoke typeface and flexible identity. We find out more.

Typography-led identity Work

Read at Creative Boom ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

How Music founded a football identity on lettering found at London's oldest stadium

Related

Steven Heller’s Font of the Month: Dez Bollardian I Love Typography

Typography is an accessibility, usability, and customer care issue, says Charles Nix Design Observer

Font Faces: Stefan Hattenbach I Love Typography

Tour de Type: Vintage-Inspired Logotype, Satisfying Lockups, and a Brand Name Written with a Ribbon The Dieline

STUDIO HERRSTRÖM draws on car culture and carton typography for Milkshake rebrand Design Week

Type + Lettering Alphabettes