This Weighted Shoehorn Rights Itself Like a Roly-Poly Toy

Shoehorns have been around for centuries, and their design has barely moved. Most are anonymous strips of plastic or metal that live behind closet doors and rarely see daylight unless someone’s wrestling with a stiff new pair of shoes. They do one job, they do it acceptably, and then they disappear. It’s a category where function was solved long ago, and form has been cheerfully overlooked ever since.

That neglect is the starting point for DROP, a concept prototype that treats the shoehorn as both a sculptural object and an emotional one. The goal isn’t to make it work better but to make it something you’d actually want to live with. That’s a harder problem, and it leads somewhere more interesting than a redesigned grip or a slightly longer handle.

Designer: Alexander Matyuk

The concept draws from a very specific moment in nature: the instant a water droplet meets a surface. That brief, almost elusive state between motion and stillness became a static form. The tall conical body represents the droplet at the moment of impact, and the shallow curved base beneath traces the ripples spreading outward. It’s a frozen movement given a permanent material shape.

The lead-weighted internal base concentrates mass low enough that DROP behaves like a roly-poly toy: tilt it, push it, set it at an angle, and it returns upright on its own. That self-righting character turns each use into a quiet interaction. The shoehorn responds to each nudge, rocks gently, then steadies itself. For something usually treated as a passive object, that responsiveness is unexpectedly engaging.

The curved shoehorn blade extends from the conical body, ready when needed. The design stands between 550mm and 700mm tall, firmly in long-handled territory. That height means you can ease your heel into a shoe without bending, which matters in a narrow entryway, for older users, or for anyone whose back has had enough by the time they’re heading out.

The designer envisions two production tiers. The premium version uses an aluminum alloy body with a lead-weighted internal base, produced through casting or milling. A mass-market version uses composites or polymers to bring the form to a lower price point. Three finish options appear in the concept: a clear glass-like version, a dark smoked variation, and a matte brushed metal option.

A shoehorn that stands on its own without a hook or bracket is already more practical than most. DROP’s broad curved base and low center of gravity mean it doesn’t need to be stored. It can stay out near the door, part of the entry space, rather than an object to stash and inevitably forget about. The ripple-shaped base takes care of that stability by itself.

DROP treats a forgotten tool as a worthy subject for genuine craft and material thinking. Most entryways could use an object that earns its spot on the floor rather than hiding behind a door. The roly-poly mechanism, the water-inspired form, and the weighted base all quietly serve that same goal.

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Hermès Just Built a DJ Table in Mahogany and Cowhide

If you told me five years ago that Hermès would release a DJ table, I’d have assumed it was a joke told at a fashion party where nobody laughed. And yet here we are, looking at the Atelier Horizons Disque Jockey Club: a fully functioning DJ setup built in mahogany and wrapped in Pippa cowhide, with Japanese turntables fitted right in. It is, objectively, one of the most absurd and wonderful things I’ve seen come out of a luxury house in recent memory.

Let me back up a little. Atelier Horizons is Hermès’ bespoke workshop, run by creative director Axel de Beaufort. It exists in that rare space where the impossible meets the impeccably crafted. We’re talking leather-covered jukeboxes with Murano glass stands. Bespoke boomboxes. A birdcage bag that reportedly took three years to complete. The whole operation runs on one guiding principle: if you can imagine it and it can be made with extraordinary craft, Horizons will figure it out. What it is not, de Beaufort has made very clear, is a branding exercise. “We are not a branded company, we are craftsmen,” he’s said. And when you look at the DJ table, you believe him.

Designer: Hermès (photos from High Snobiety Design)

The Disque Jockey Club was developed in collaboration with British DJ Prince Charles (yes, that’s his actual name, and no, he is not a monarch). It’s fully functional, not decorative. The turntables are real, the mixer is real, and the whole setup performs exactly as a working DJ rig should. The French furniture craftsmen who built the wooden structure made sure of that. But it’s the material choices that make it so specifically Hermès: mahogany, warm and rich, paired with cowskin that has that unmistakable texture of something made to last several lifetimes. It doesn’t shout luxury. It doesn’t need to.

I’ll be the first to admit that a designer DJ table sits comfortably in the category of things very few people actually need. But I think that framing misses the point entirely. Atelier Horizons isn’t about need. It never was. It’s about the intersection of craft and desire, about what happens when a house with nearly two centuries of leather expertise decides to turn its attention toward a turntable. The result is less a product and more a provocation: what if the things we use to make music were treated with the same care and intention as the things we wear?

That question lands differently right now. We live in an era of disposable aesthetics, where everything from furniture to consumer electronics is designed to be replaced within a few years. The Hermès DJ table is the philosophical opposite of that. It’s an object that asks to be kept, passed down, maybe even argued over in an estate somewhere decades from now. There is something genuinely radical about that, even if the price tag ensures it lives in a very particular tax bracket.

All of this fits into a broader shift happening across luxury right now. The most interesting moves aren’t on the runway; they’re in spaces like this, where fashion houses start thinking like furniture designers, architects, and now apparently audio engineers. Hermès isn’t the only brand doing it, but they might be doing it with the most conviction. The Atelier Horizons pieces never feel like branded merchandise dressed up in leather. They feel like objects that had to exist, born from a genuine creative compulsion rather than a marketing calendar.

The DJ table is also, let’s be honest, wildly compelling on a purely visual level. The combination of dark mahogany and pale cowhide is exactly the kind of thing that photographs beautifully and looks even better in person. It occupies a room with quiet confidence and zero need for explanation. It’s not decorative in the way most luxury objects lean decorative. It’s still a working tool, one that just happens to look extraordinary while doing its job. You don’t have to be a DJ to want it. You don’t even have to own a record. You just have to appreciate the idea that craft, when taken seriously, can turn almost anything into art.

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Ferrari Luce brings Jony Ive’s clean design philosophy to electric sports car built for pure driving emotion

Ferrari has been quietly working under the wraps to design an electric sports car in collaboration with LoveFrom, led by Jony Ive and Marc Newson. After much speculation and a run of rumors for quite some time, the Maranello-based car maker has finally revealed Luce, its first-ever electric sports car, to the world, which, quite frankly, looks unlike the prancing horse we are accustomed to seeing. The four-door EV is all set to arrive in the USA by spring 2027 for around $430,000, and we hope the performance will mute critics like us, who have been used to the sculpted form of the Ferrari for decades.

Love it or hate it, the exterior and interior done by Jhony’s design house is a radical shift from what the Italian marque is known for. The car is shaped more like a performance SUV that can safely carry around five people inside. Yes, that’s right, as the Purosangue SUV held that honor before this reveal. Under the hood, the muted prancing horse is built around a completely new all-electric architecture.

Designer: Ferrari

Ferrari Luce gets its combined 1,050 horsepower thrust from the four independent electric motors that hurl it from a standstill to 200 km/h in mere 2.5 seconds. Top speed can go in excess of 310 km/h, which is right there in the Ferrari territory. The electric motors feeding four of the wheels independently derive their power from the 122kWh battery pack developed on the 800V architecture. Driving range on this performance vehicle is claimed to be 530km, but I’m sure in the high-octane driving modes, it’ll drop quite significantly. Ferrari has confirmed that the EV supports 350kW charging speed, with more than half the battery juiced up in just 20 minutes.

The all-electric architecture and the futuristic looks are not the only big changes. Luce comes loaded with technologies never before seen on a road-legal Ferrari. Things like active aerodynamic grilles, active suspension (used in the F80 hypercar), Torque Shift Engagement system to simulate progressive acceleration, and the four-wheel independent torque vectoring we talked about earlier. The Italian marque has also been able to achieve the lowest drag coefficient ever on a road car thanks to the aerodynamic all-aluminum bodywork and the adaptive ride height system, which lowers the front section by 10mm at high speeds.

Cabin on this one is far forward than any other Ferrari we’ve seen, and the center-opening side doors demonstrate what influence LoveFrom has had on the EV sports car. The futuristic front seems floating, while the rear has a more Ferrari sports car vibe to it. Nonetheless, the overall exterior design is “smooth, continuous, and uninterrupted.” The interior carries the same futuristic design inspiration with a Samsung Display developed OLED layered dashboard that employs Samsung’s HIAA tech, natively used in Galaxy phones. The layered layout of the instrument cluster is first ever seen on a production car, as the two OLED panels stacked on top of each other have mechanical hands sandwiched between them. There’s a central pivoting touchscreen with physical switches on the Luce, and another screen on the rear for the passengers. The aluminum steering wheel has a couple of manettino dials, an e-manettino dial to control the powertrain, and a standard five-position unit.

Ferrari Luce has a total curb weight of 4,982 pounds, measures 197.9 inches long, and 60.8 inches high. This gives the maker freedom to set the center of gravity quite low for superior handling and minimum body roll, as the weight distribution is done quite well for sharper handling characteristics. Being one of the biggest road-going Ferraris ever made, the performance EV rides on 23-inch front and 24-inch rear wheels to complement the proportions.

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8 Summer EDC Essentials So Well-Designed We Carry Them Every Single Day

Summer edits your carry down to what actually earns its place. Pockets get shallower, days stretch longer, and the patience for objects that solve problems you don’t have disappears entirely. What survives that edit is a specific kind of thing — gear that performs with such quiet consistency you stop noticing it, until the day you leave it behind and immediately feel its absence. That’s the design standard this list holds to.

The eight products here span materials from full-grain leather to aircraft-grade titanium, functions from navigation to tracking to illumination, and price points from considered to genuinely surprising. Some are old enough to have earned their reputation without needing to announce it. Others are newer but carry the same unhurried confidence of objects that know exactly what they’re for. All of them reward a summer that moves fast and asks a lot from the things you carry.

1. AirTag Carabiner

Apple’s AirTag arrived as one of the most useful small objects of the last decade and shipped with no good answer to the question of how to carry it. Every case that followed treated the tracker as cargo — something to be accommodated rather than integrated. A purpose-built AirTag carabiner changes that relationship entirely, folding the tracker into a gate clip that performs as both tracking device and functional hardware without either function compromising the other. No protrusions, no awkward bulk, no aesthetic apology.

The summer case is specific. Beach bags left at a spot, day packs rotating between people, rental bikes at a festival — the carabiner means the AirTag follows the object rather than requiring a deliberate second step to attach or remember. Machined aluminum reads intentional alongside quality leather or ripstop goods and handles salt air, UV, and bag wear without complaint. It’s the kind of upgrade that seems obvious once you’re using it and unnecessary until the moment it isn’t.

Click Here to Buy Now: $149.00

What we like

Tracking hardware integrated into a functional carry tool removes the awkward middle step of managing a loose disc with no natural home
The gate clip handles real load and daily use rather than serving purely as a display mechanism for the AirTag

What we dislike

AirTag replacement requires opening the carabiner body, which varies by design and isn’t always a one-handed operation in the field
Works exclusively within Apple’s Find My network — Android users carry nothing usable here

2. Olight Baton 4 Premium Edition

The Baton 4 Premium’s best design decision isn’t the 1,300-lumen output or the magnetic tail cap — it’s the flip-top charging case that lets you activate the flashlight without removing it from the case at all. Open the lid, press the side button, and the light fires. That single interaction collapses the gap between a flashlight that lives in a bag and one that’s actually ready when something happens. The case also carries 5,000mAh, which means it recharges the Baton 4 up to five times and fills a phone running low mid-afternoon.

Summer nights are specifically where this earns its keep. Power outages during heat waves. Poorly lit parking structures at outdoor venues. The walk back to a campsite after a late fire. The magnetic tail cap converts the flashlight into a freestanding lantern by sticking to any steel surface, removing the need for a separate camp light in most situations. The IP68 waterproof rating handles rain without any adjustment required. Olight has made fewer products than most of its competitors and made them better, and the Baton 4 Premium is the clearest expression of that.

What we like

The charging case serves as a functional 5,000mAh power bank and activates the flashlight without removing it — two carry problems resolved by one object
The magnetic tail cap frees both hands during stationary tasks without requiring any additional accessories

What we dislike

Maximum 1,300-lumen output demands battery and drains quickly at full brightness — the case is a compensating mechanism, which means they need to travel as a pair
The case adds volume to the carry; users wanting the flashlight alone will need to leave the case’s power bank function behind

3. CraftMaster EDC Utility Knife

Most utility knives are industrial objects that tolerate being carried rather than inviting it. The CraftMaster moves the design conversation to a different place — a slim, considered profile that sits flush in a pocket and deploys a blade with the kind of controlled action that signals something built to a real standard. The form factor is purpose-built for people who cut things regularly during the day but don’t want to reach for an object that looks like it belongs on a construction site.

The blade swap mechanism is where the functional case gets specific. Precision work, whether opening summer deliveries to a vacation rental, trimming materials mid-project, or handling gear maintenance on the road, is better with a fresh edge rather than an apologetic compromise of a dull one. Having a design that makes the blade replacement clean and fast, rather than a minor ordeal, matters in practice across a long season of daily use. This is an EDC knife that understands the difference between a tool you carry and one you keep reaching for.

Click Here to Buy Now: $80.00

What we like

The slim profile fits a shorts pocket without the blade-forward bulk that makes most utility knives feel incompatible with summer carry
Replaceable blades mean the cutting performance stays consistent across the full season rather than degrading to an acceptable diminishment

What we dislike

Utility blades require sourcing compatible replacements, which adds a minor supply consideration that a fixed-blade EDC knife doesn’t carry
The design sits closer to a precision tool than a versatile field knife, which may not satisfy users looking for one object to handle both categories

4. Orbitkey Key Organiser

A standard key ring solves the organizational problem with the bluntness of something designed before pockets had size constraints. Keys stack against each other, jingle against everything nearby, and press uncomfortable ridges into the thigh pocket of summer trousers all day. The Orbitkey stacks two to seven keys flat inside a full-grain leather spine and stainless steel hardware, held under tension, producing no movement and no sound. Closed, it sits flat. In a pocket, it disappears.

The leather exterior develops its own grain and wear pattern over years of daily use — an explicit design position about longevity that most keychain products don’t take. The two-screw expansion system accommodates keys confidently up to its rated capacity, and a small ring attachment handles anything that doesn’t stack flat inside the body. Five colorways cover the range from black dress leather to warmer cognac tones. This is an object that solves a problem so quietly that after the first week, you only notice it when you try to go back.

What we like

The tension stacking system eliminates key jingle, which sounds like a minor quality-of-life gain until you experience the cumulative silence of a full summer without it
Full-grain leather construction ages into character rather than showing damage — the material signals a product built to outlast the trend cycle

What we dislike

Initial key installation involves a screwdriver and careful threading — not difficult, but not intuitive either, and the setup time is a real first-use commitment
Oversized or irregularly headed keys may not stack cleanly within the system’s geometry, which is worth checking before purchase

5. DraftPro Top Can Opener

A can opener is one of those objects most people own in the worst version that technically works. The DraftPro is the version that makes the case for caring about the design of a can opener, built around a top-cut mechanism that removes the entire lid flush rather than creating a jagged inner edge. The resulting can becomes a safe, open container rather than a minor hazard. The form is compact, the materials are considered, and the grip handles the torque of the task without requiring you to adjust mid-turn.

In summer specifically, the top-cut mechanism earns its place during outdoor cooking — at a campsite, a tailgate, or a beach house stocked with canned goods and minimal gear. There’s no snagged lid to fish out of the contents and no sharp rim to watch for when reaching into the can. The compact footprint means it packs into a cooking kit without requiring its own dedicated compartment. It’s the kind of product that rewards the decision to care about the design of even the tools you only reach for occasionally.

Click Here to Buy Now: $60.00

What we like

The flush top-cut mechanism removes the lid cleanly with no jagged inner edge and no floating metal to dig out of the food — a genuine functional improvement over the standard approach
Compact enough to live in a cooking kit, travel bag, or kitchen drawer without claiming space it hasn’t earned

What we dislike

The top-cut mechanism requires slightly more grip coordination than a traditional side-cut opener — the learning curve is short but real for first-time uses
Not designed for cans with non-standard lip profiles, which occasionally appear in imported or specialty goods

6. Loki Nav Compass

Most navigation tools have been optimized for a single condition: favorable ones. The Loki Nav by EckDesign starts from the opposite position — a Grade 5 titanium compass system engineered specifically for the conditions where GPS fails, the phone goes flat, or the environment makes electronics unreliable. Three interchangeable oil-filled compass modules provide a redundant navigation system in a 46.5mm body weighing 48 grams. The IPX8 waterproof rating means submersion to a meter for thirty minutes is a non-event. The cap houses a 12× magnifying loupe, an emergency mirror, and a wood file for fire-starting tinder.

The design logic is worth pausing on. Everything non-essential has been removed; everything that remains serves a specific function under pressure. The loupe rotates to protect the lens when not deployed. The mirror sits inside the cap, accessible without disassembly. The compass modules swap out via a toothpick through a base hole — a repair mechanism that works without tools. Summer outdoor itineraries that push past well-marked trails, coastal kayaking routes, and backcountry hiking all describe situations where the Loki Nav transitions from a beautiful object in a pocket to the most important thing in it.

What we like

Three interchangeable compass modules create a navigation system with built-in redundancy — a design decision that treats reliability as a first principle rather than a feature mention
The 3-in-1 cap packs mirror, loupe, and fire-starting file into a hinged cover rather than requiring separate tools for each function

What we dislike

At 48 grams in titanium, the Loki Nav is noticeably heavier than a basic compass — the weight is justified by the feature set but worth considering for ultralight carry setups
The compass module swapping mechanism, while elegant, involves a toothpick-through-base-hole method that takes practice to execute cleanly under field conditions

7. WESN Ridgeback Microblade

WESN approaches EDC from a position most tool brands don’t occupy — the belief that a well-made small object can carry the same material and craft standards as something three times its price and size. The Ridgeback Microblade is a fixed blade built to live in a pocket or on a keychain without announcing itself, machined from titanium with a blade steel chosen for edge retention under daily-use conditions. The form is narrow enough to disappear into any carry setup and substantial enough to register as a real cutting tool when deployed.

Fixed blades are fundamentally more useful than folding knives in the situations that matter most — faster deployment, no mechanical failure point, and less maintenance over a season of outdoor use. The Ridgeback addresses the reason most people don’t carry one: size. This is a blade designed for the specific constraint of summer pockets, where the margin between comfortable carry and uncomfortable carry is measured in millimeters. It’s the kind of precision that only appears when a brand is genuinely thinking about the object rather than simply satisfying a product line requirement.

What we like

The fixed blade format provides faster, more reliable deployment than any folder, while the Ridgeback’s profile keeps it genuinely pocketable in summer carry
Titanium construction handles salt, humidity, and daily use without the maintenance overhead that blade steel requires in coastal summer environments

What we dislike

Fixed blades occupy a complicated legal position in some jurisdictions — blade length and carry rules vary by location and are worth checking before traveling
The minimal form factor prioritizes portability over grip depth, which limits utility for tasks requiring sustained cutting pressure

8. Urban Pack

The Urban Pack resolves the tension that every commuter bag eventually creates: the design that works for a laptop meeting doesn’t work for a weekend overnight, and vice versa. Loft of Combie’s approach is modular — a carry system built around zippered separation that lets the bag configure to the day rather than requiring you to pack around a fixed interior. The external form reads clean and intentional rather than tactical, which matters when the pack is moving between a client-facing context in the morning and a trail or beach in the afternoon.

Summer specifically is the season when a single bag that reads across contexts is the most valuable thing in a carry rotation. Travel weekends, work trips that extend into leisure, day hikes that start from an office — the Urban Pack absorbs these transitions without requiring a gear change. The construction is honest about its materials, and the strap system distributes load without the overengineered hardware that makes most technical packs look like they belong in a different context entirely. This is a bag that earns its place through daily practicality rather than feature accumulation.

What we like

The modular configuration adapts to the actual demands of the day rather than requiring the user to adapt their packing to the bag’s fixed logic
The considered exterior aesthetic moves comfortably across professional and outdoor contexts without the visual code-switching that tactical bags force

What we dislike

Modular systems require an initial investment of time to understand how the configurations interact — the flexibility is real, but so is the learning curve
The clean exterior silhouette prioritizes appearance over external attachment points, which limits quick-access options for high-frequency items during active use

The Best EDC Is the Gear You Stop Thinking About

Every one of these objects earned its place through the same filter — not by being the most expensive or the most specified, but by being the most considered. Good EDC design doesn’t ask you to sacrifice function for form or form for function. It finds the point where those two things stop arguing and start working together, then holds that line across daily use, weather, and the small, relentless friction of a summer that moves faster than you plan for.

What ties this specific eight together is the refusal to waste a single design decision. The AirTag Carabiner doesn’t apologize for being two things at once. The Loki Nav doesn’t hedge on durability. The Orbitkey doesn’t give you extra features you didn’t ask for. That restraint is harder to achieve than complexity, and it’s what makes these objects feel inevitable once they’ve been in your pocket long enough. Summer is the best time to find out which gear is actually worth carrying.

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ASUS V400 All-in-One Ditched Intel for Snapdragon to Stay Slim and Silent

All-in-one computers have always promised clean desks, but they rarely deliver a truly minimal presence. Traditional AiOs hide their processors inside their displays, and those chips generate enough heat to demand substantial cooling, adding bulk to what should be a space-saving device. The result is often a thick, monitor-shaped box that makes you wish the cables were the only problem.

ASUS’s answer to that problem isn’t a slimmer chassis on paper, but a different processor choice entirely. The V400 AiO is the first all-in-one PC built on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X platform, an ARM-based chip with mobile roots. Because it runs more efficiently than conventional desktop processors, it generates less heat, which means the cooling system can shrink significantly, and so can everything around it.

Designer: ASUS

The lean stand and uncluttered rear panel make the V400 AiO look more like a monitor than a desktop. In a living room or study doubling as a homework station, it doesn’t demand attention the way a traditional AiO does. The quieter cooling helps too; no loud fans cycling up during video calls or while someone streams in the next room.

The 23.8-inch Full HD IPS display supports touch input and covers the full sRGB color gamut, making it comfortable for both casual browsing and creative work. With up to 32 GB of LPDDR5X memory and up to 1 TB of PCIe 4.0 SSD storage, it handles simultaneous tasks without hesitation. The 5-megapixel IR camera gives video calls a cleaner look than most built-in webcams manage.

The Snapdragon X’s 45 TOPS NPU qualifies the V400 AiO as a Copilot+ PC, meaning it runs Microsoft’s on-device AI features without routing anything through the cloud. Smart photo management, real-time voice processing, and intelligent assistance all happen locally, keeping personal data off third-party servers. For a machine that’ll likely sit in a shared family space, that kind of privacy has practical appeal.

Dolby Atmos handles the audio, which makes a difference when the V400 AiO doubles as an entertainment hub for the family. Connectivity includes HDMI output, USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, and USB-C ports, covering most peripherals without adapters. A wireless keyboard and mouse ship in the box, so the whole setup can be up and running without hunting for extra accessories.

ASUS priced the entry-level V400 AiO at $649.99 in the US, with 16 GB of RAM and a 512 GB SSD. The Indian market gets a 512 GB model at ₹1,01,990 and a 1 TB version at ₹1,11,990. For an all-in-one that doubles credibly as a piece of furniture in a modern room, that starting point asks less than many Intel-powered competitors.

What the V400 AiO makes clear is that the Snapdragon X choice isn’t incidental. The chip’s lower heat output is why the chassis stays slim. Its efficient architecture is why the AI runs locally rather than through a server. Its quiet thermal profile is why it belongs in a living room as much as a home office. The processor determines the design, not the other way around.

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Logitech’s Comfort Plus Mouse packs a Palm Cushion for WFH People Who Take Meetings While Doing Chores

Forty-one percent of people have folded towels while on a work call. One in five have taken meetings from a makeshift setup in their child’s bedroom. Logitech’s own research surfaced these numbers, and they carry the ring of something widely felt but rarely acknowledged. The idea that work and home occupy separate territories has been quietly unraveling for years, and for a significant share of the workforce, that unraveling is now complete. The home does not have an office. The home is the office, and the laundry basket and the borrowed desk chair and the animated bedsheet on the wall behind you are all part of the same workday.

Logitech’s response to that reality is the Signature Comfort Plus lineup, announced today. The product anchoring it is the M850L mouse, and it carries one genuinely new detail: a palm cushion, the first Logitech has ever put on a mouse. It is a soft, fitted support designed for the kind of desk day that starts with a 9 AM call and ends somewhere in the evening without a clean break in between. The cushion reportedly took months of prototyping to land correctly, with the team working through texture, size, and material, spending months pivoting and exploring before arriving at something that actually worked.

Designer: Logitech

The development question the team kept returning to was deceptively simple: how soft is soft enough? At the launch briefing, Benjamin Ehrenberg walked us through the product’s development arc, including the moment colleagues first handled the prototype. The reaction, by the team’s own account, was immediate: “Wow, this is really amazing. Hey, this mouse is awesome. This mouse feels amazing.” User trials backed that up: 9 out of 10 users felt comfortable at the end of the workday, which is a genuine testament to the development of the product. Seven out of ten also felt more productive with the mouse. The cushion sits beneath the base of the palm, shaped to support the hand across scroll sessions, writing stretches, and the general low-grade physical endurance that a long desk day requires.

Beyond that central feature, the M850L carries the hardware expected from a Signature mouse: a sculpted shape that fits the hand more naturally, rubber side grips for precision and control, and a thumb support area for that extra thumb support. SmartWheel scrolling lets you move line by line or fly through pages, quiet clicks keep the noise floor low in shared spaces, and Easy Switch handles up to three connected devices across nearly any platform. Logi Options+ handles button customization. Battery life is rated at two years. Among the designers credited with shaping the product’s physical form is Irfan Kachwala, who appeared in Logitech’s promotional film for the lineup and also happens to be a senior from my design alma mater, which was just about as pleasantly surprising as seeing Logitech’s new products every cycle.

Sitting alongside the mouse in the MK880 combo is a keyboard that takes the same comfort-forward brief seriously. The dual-foam palm rest delivers 70% more palm support compared to the Logitech K650, and typing angles can be set at three positions: 0, 4, or 8 degrees. Keys are deep-cushioned, with curved typing angles built for more comfortable, sustained sessions. In a shared apartment or a kitchen-table setup, that lower noise profile makes a real practical difference.

Dedicated mic mute and video toggle keys sit on the keyboard layout, a feature Logitech first established on the Signature Slim and is clearly doubling down on across its lineup. Paired with Logi Tune, these controls can be assigned for Zoom Workplace and Microsoft Teams, while the Logi Options+ app lets users set up Smart Actions to automate common tasks. The honest commentary here is that a physical key to kill your mic should have been standard hardware during the pandemic in 2020, when video calls went from optional to mandatory overnight. That it is arriving at scale now, five-plus years later, is a small frustration softened by the fact that it is at least arriving consistently. A dedicated AI Launch Key rounds out the top row, giving instant access to tools like Copilot, Gemini, or ChatGPT, fully reassignable through Logi Options+ to whatever a user actually reaches for. AI keys are becoming a fixture on productivity keyboards, and the configurable approach is the sensible one.

The M850L mouse is priced at $49.99, and the MK880 combo lands at $99.99. Business versions, which include the Logi Bolt USB-C receiver and Logitech Sync for IT management, come in at $59.99 and $109.99 respectively. Both are available from June 2026 on logitech.com and through authorized resellers, in graphite and off-white globally, with black in select channels. Plastic parts contain between 49% and 77% post-consumer recycled material depending on color, and products ship in FSC-certified paper packaging.

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Vizcom x Corkway Launch a ‘Cork Design Challenge’ With Winning Designs Getting Industrial Production

Cork has spent decades being underestimated. Wine stoppers, bulletin boards, yoga mats, the occasional floor tile. Somewhere along the way, a material with genuinely remarkable engineering properties got slotted into the background of everyday objects.

That changed when designers started paying attention to cork’s unique properties: it absorbs sound, repels moisture, insulates against heat, compresses without cracking, and comes from a tree that absorbs more carbon than it releases. The story of cork is really a story of a material waiting for the right question to be asked of it.

Vizcom and Corkway are asking that question now. Their Cork Design Challenge invites designers worldwide to reimagine cork in the spaces where people live, gather, and work, from home interiors to public installations to office environments. The brief is intentionally wide, letting designers push the boundaries of the material: from wall coverings, ergonomic objects, acoustic installations, to even sculptural décor. What makes the challenge compelling is that the top three designs get physically manufactured, CNC-milled from cork blocks in Portugal, and shipped to the winners. Submissions are open through June 8, 2026.

Click Here to Submit Now: Hurry, last date to enter is June 8, 2026.

The Brief

Vizcom and Corkway have structured the challenge around three spatial contexts: home, public, and office — each offering a different lens on how cork can enhance our everyday lives.

Designers are invited to think about how cork can enhance the comfort, experience, or functionality of a home? Could it redefine public installations or elevate office spaces?

At home, the intent is to push cork into décor and wall treatments that reframe how the material reads in a living space.

In public environments, the scope opens to installations, wayfinding systems, and seating concepts that could meaningfully transform communal areas.

Office applications lean into cork’s acoustic and tactile properties, where sound-absorbing partitions, ergonomic desk objects, and creative meeting environments are all fair game.

The Constraints

Creativity comes from constraints and these are the non-negotiables participants must keep in mind while they design:

Your design must be able to be CNC milled
Painted cork designs must be RAL colors
Must be at least 70% cork
Supplementary material can only be metal or plastic
Objects must be no larger than 890 (L) x 590 (W) x 180 (H) mm in total volume

The Submission

All entries must be designed in Vizcom: from early sketches through to final renders — and include a 3D model generated using Vizcom’s Make 3D tool as part of the submission.

All submissions must include:

Project name and description
Project inspiration
Vizcom project file link
Main hero image
Five final design images
One optional animation file

The best part: the winning concepts are made real. Corkway, the manufacturing partner behind the challenge will CNC-mill the top three designs from cork blocks at their production facility in Portugal and ship the finished objects to the winners. The challenge highlights the workflow from sketch to render, to real.

How To Participate

Log in or create a free account at vizcom.com

Access the Vizcom Template file from the Learn section
Design your concept within Vizcom, ensuring your project meets the production constraints outlined in the challenge guide

Generate a 3D model in Vizcom and set your project file to “Anyone with link” sharing

Submit your final entry at the challenge page before June 8 at 11:59 PM EST, including your project file link, hero image, five final design images, and a written project description and inspiration

Competition Dates

May 25, 2026 – Prompt released at 9:00 AM EST
June 8, 2026 – Submission deadline at 11:59 PM EST
June 16, 2026 – Top 30 announced
June 23, 2026 – Top 3 announced
Month of July – Production begins with Corkway

Judging Criteria

Entries will be evaluated by a panel of industry designers across five criteria:

Creativity and Originality (30%) – How well the design explores cork’s texture, flexibility, acoustic properties, and sustainability in meaningful ways
Design Quality and Spatial Experience (25%) – How well the concept integrates into a space, enhancing atmosphere, usability, and visual appeal
Feasibility and Material Understanding (20%) – Demonstrated understanding of cork as a material, including its strengths, limitations, and manufacturing possibilities
Process and Use of Vizcom (15%) – How ideas were explored, iterated, and developed using the platform
Alignment with Brief (10%) – How clearly the design connects to home, public, or office contexts while enhancing comfort, functionality, or experience

What You Can Win

Your design, manufactured – in collaboration with Corkway, the top 3 winning designs will be CNC-milled and shipped to the winners
Featured story – winning designs will be showcased across Vizcom’s site, social channels, and newsletter
Vizcom Pro licenses – each winner receives 3 months of Vizcom’s Pro plan, free

Challenge Resources

Need feedback before you submit? Vizcom and Corkway are hosting two open office hours (May 28 at 12PM ET and June 5 at 10AM ET) — and keeping a #cork-challenge Discord channel open throughout the competition for material questions, design advice, and production guidance.

Join the Challenge

If you’re a designer who’s ever wanted to see your idea made real, this is your chance. Design in Vizcom and submit your work by June 8 at 11:59PM for a chance to see it come to life.

How will you imagine cork in spaces we live, gather, and work?

Click Here to Submit Now: Hurry, last date to enter is June 8, 2026.

The post Vizcom x Corkway Launch a ‘Cork Design Challenge’ With Winning Designs Getting Industrial Production first appeared on Yanko Design.

Africa’s Tallest Tower Was Worth the 40-Year Wait

Forty years is a long time to wait for a building. But when you see what’s rising in Abidjan, the delay starts to feel almost intentional — like the city was simply holding its breath for the right moment. Tour F, the supertall skyscraper currently piercing the skyline of Ivory Coast’s economic capital, was first imagined in the 1970s as part of a sweeping urban development plan for Abidjan’s Plateau district. The idea was straightforward: complement the existing administrative towers — A through E — with a sixth.

What wasn’t straightforward was actually building it. The project stalled for decades, a vision suspended in bureaucratic and economic uncertainty. Construction finally broke ground in 2021, with BESIX Group drilling 70 foundation bars and 62-meter-deep diaphragm wall panels to anchor the structure.

Designer: Pierre Fakhoury

Designed by Lebanese-Ivorian architect Pierre Fakhoury — the same mind behind the breathtaking Notre-Dame de la Paix Basilica in Yamoussoukro — Tower F is not trying to be a generic glass box. It has something to say. The form is sculptural: a slender volume whose facade is carved into trapezoidal inclined glass planes, each facet tilting inward toward the earth or reaching toward the sky. The top is cleanly truncated, then crowned with a dramatic extension of the glass facade that dissolves into open air. It’s restrained and bold at the same time — a difficult balance that Fakhoury pulls off with architectural confidence.

What makes the design genuinely compelling is its embedded cultural logic. When viewed from a certain angle, the play of facets reads as a stylized African mask — a nod to West African artistic tradition embedded quietly into a 21st-century supertall. The building is symmetrical along its east-west axis, grounding the sculptural gesture in structural clarity. At street level, a simple rectangular podium houses the main entrance hall and support services, keeping the base honest and approachable despite the tower’s imposing scale.

At 421 meters, Tower F is set to claim the title of Africa’s tallest building, surpassing The Leonardo in Johannesburg. The gross floor area reaches approximately 140,000 square meters, consolidating government ministries and administrative units currently scattered across the city — a practical ambition wrapped in an extraordinary shell.

Construction costs are estimated at approximately €450 million, developed through a collaboration between the Ivorian Ministry of Construction and local firm PFO Africa. Completion is expected in 2026. For a continent whose architectural ambitions are accelerating fast, Tower F is exactly the kind of project that reframes the conversation — not just about African skylines, but about what it means to design a building that carries cultural memory into the future.

The post Africa’s Tallest Tower Was Worth the 40-Year Wait first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Dual-Sided Philips Monitor Lets You Share One Screen With Clients Without Sacrificing Desk Space

The business monitor market rarely sees truly original ideas, but Philips may have found one with the new Philips 24B2D5300. Instead of chasing higher resolutions or curved ultrawide panels, the company has introduced what it calls the world’s first standalone dual-sided monitor, placing two full HD displays back-to-back inside a single chassis. The idea sounds unconventional at first, but its practical applications quickly become obvious in customer-facing environments, collaborative offices, reception counters, healthcare desks, banks, retail spaces, and coworking setups where information needs to be shared across a desk without awkwardly rotating a screen.

The monitor uses two 23.8-inch IPS LCD panels, each with a 1920 x 1080 resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate. Both displays support wide 178-degree viewing angles, ensuring the image remains visible and color accurate from nearly any position. Philips also includes its SoftBlue low-blue-light technology and TÜV Rheinland certification to reduce eye strain during long work sessions. Unlike standard dual-monitor setups that consume more desk space and require additional cabling, the 24B2D5300 integrates everything into one footprint while still offering two independently usable screens.

Designer: Philips

The real innovation lies in how the screens can operate. Philips’ DualView and SmartView software features allow the monitor to either mirror content across both displays or extend the desktop independently. In practice, this means an employee can keep confidential information visible only on their side while showing approved content such as invoices, forms, instructions, transaction details, or queue information to customers on the opposite display. It can also function as a collaborative workstation where two users interact with the same computer from opposite sides of a desk. Philips even claims the monitor can handle up to three simultaneous application windows through its split-screen functionality.

Connectivity is equally business-focused as each side includes its own HDMI and USB-C ports, with the USB-C connections supporting up to 65W power delivery for laptops and notebooks. The monitor can connect to one or multiple devices simultaneously, allowing the screens to function independently if needed. Built-in stereo speakers, USB hub functionality, and synchronized on-screen display controls further simplify workspace management. A 180-degree swivel stand also helps users quickly rotate the display to check the opposite screen without repositioning the entire setup.

While the hardware specifications themselves are relatively modest by gaming or creative-professional standards, the product is clearly aimed at improving workflow efficiency rather than visual performance. The monitor’s compact design could be particularly useful in environments where counter space is limited, but customer interaction is constant. Tech observers have already pointed out that the concept feels surprisingly practical despite its unusual appearance, especially for front-desk staff, service counters, and collaborative workplaces.

The Philips 24B2D5300 is expected to launch in parts of Europe beginning in June 2026, with reported pricing starting around £359.99 (roughly $480). Availability in other markets has not yet been confirmed, though the monitor’s distinctive functionality could easily attract broader global interest if businesses see value in its space-saving and customer-friendly design.

The post This Dual-Sided Philips Monitor Lets You Share One Screen With Clients Without Sacrificing Desk Space first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Lounge Chair That Has No Welds, No Joints, and No Legs – Just One Bent Sheet of Metal

Sheet metal has been a furniture material for decades, but it almost always gets hidden. It becomes the internal skeleton, the underframe, the bracket buried beneath upholstery or lacquer. The design conversation rarely starts with the metal. Deniz Özdemir’s Arc One, an A’ Design Award-winning lounge chair developed in Istanbul between October 2025 and February 2026, turns that convention completely around, making the sheet metal the entire visible statement and letting the leather cushions play second fiddle to the structural drama underneath them.

From the side profile, the Arc One reads as a single continuous gesture, one surface that sweeps from backrest plane through seat pan and curls forward into the base. No legs. No frame. No secondary structure of any kind. The bent metal does all of it simultaneously, and Özdemir arrived at that form using only laser cutting and CNC bending, two processes that leave no room for the kind of hand-finishing that usually disguises manufacturing decisions in premium furniture.

Designer: Deniz Özdemir

Most lounge chairs are assemblies, a frame joined to a seat shell joined to a base, each junction representing a production step, a potential failure point, and a logistics complication. Arc One eliminates all of that. The single-piece body requires no welding and no mechanical fastening, which means the bare frames stack flat for storage and transport, a logistical advantage that most furniture at this aesthetic level completely ignores. Özdemir’s research documentation notes that this directly reduces both production complexity and logistics volume, and looking at the photographs of the bare stacked frames, the practicality of that claim is immediately visible.

A round tufted back cushion and a square tufted seat cushion attach to the metal body via leather straps with snap fasteners, hardware that belongs more in a saddle shop than a furniture atelier. The strap details are visible and intentional, running horizontally across the metal surface with small riveted or snapped connections that read as honest joinery rather than disguised engineering. Remove the cushions entirely, and the bare metal frame is a genuinely severe object. Reattach them, and the warmth is immediate and complete, all without the metal structure yielding anything of its industrial character.

The cognac brown of the tufted leather against brushed raw metal is a pairing with serious mid-century pedigree, recalling the material confidence of Osvaldo Borsani’s work from the 1950s and 60s, where Italian designers routinely married industrial metal frames with generous upholstery without apologizing for either. The Arc One’s ottoman extends the family naturally, same bent-base logic scaled down, topped with a square tufted cushion that mirrors the seat in a different colorway.

At 650mm wide, 750mm deep, and 850mm tall, the proportions sit comfortably within lounge chair conventions without disappearing into them. The replaceable upholstery is the long-game move that most furniture at this price positioning forgets to make. Leather wears, tastes change, and a chair whose cushions can be swapped out for a different color or material is a chair with a genuinely extended lifespan. That decision transforms the Arc One from a sculptural object with a fixed personality into something closer to a platform.

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