Sydney Just Opened a 42-Metre Steel Lookout Over a Former Quarry

If you told me a 42-metre platform made of weathering steel, suspended over a former rock quarry, would be one of the most compelling pieces of public architecture right now, I’d say I believe you completely. The Southern Lookout at Hornsby Park in Sydney is exactly that. And it is worth every bit of attention it’s getting.

Designed by AJC Architects in collaboration with Clouston Associates, the structure sits on the northern edge of Sydney, overlooking the dramatic topography of Hornsby Quarry. The site itself has a remarkable backstory. For over a century, the quarry was completely inaccessible to the public. A place that had been carved out and worked, left to become something between ruin and wilderness, invisible to the city that had grown up around it. The Southern Lookout is the first completed architectural piece of a much larger 60-hectare landscape masterplan. It is, in the most literal sense, an opening.

Designer: AJC Architects

The choice of weathering steel is the first thing that makes you stop and think. Cor-Ten, as it’s commonly known, is a material that rusts deliberately. It forms a stable oxidized layer on its surface that protects the steel beneath while giving it that signature warm, amber-brown tone. It is a material that ages visibly and honestly, and for a project like this one, placed on the edge of a quarry whose story is entirely about time and transformation, it feels less like a design decision and more like a point of view.

The platform runs 42 metres through the forest canopy, anchored into the embankment and balanced on four angled columns that converge on a single central footing below. That minimalism is intentional. The architects worked specifically to keep ground disturbance on the sensitive slope to a minimum. The result is a structure that feels both bold and careful, which is a hard balance to get right, and one AJC Architects manages convincingly.

Walking it is designed to be as much of an experience as looking at it. The rhythmic sound of footsteps on the metal, the glimpses of the falling topography beneath one’s feet, the steady build of height as you move further along the platform create a physical connection to the sheer scale of the man-made canyon. Every design choice is oriented toward making you feel exactly where you are. That kind of sensory engagement is something the best public infrastructure delivers and so rarely does. Most walkways just take you somewhere. This one makes you reckon with the place itself.

The entrance is framed by steel portals and gabion stone walls, the kind of raw structural language that references the quarry’s industrial character without cosplaying it. It doesn’t try to look cute or approachable. It looks like something that belongs to the site. That restraint is refreshing at a time when so many public design projects err on the side of spectacle for its own sake.

The broader context matters here too. The Southern Lookout is the inaugural phase of an ambitious plan to open Hornsby Quarry up as a 60-hectare public park. That kind of urban regeneration project usually moves at a pace that frustrates everyone involved, so the fact that this lookout is already open, already drawing visitors, already giving people a reason to show up, feels like a meaningful start rather than a placeholder.

AJC Architects, working in collaboration with Hornsby Shire Council, has delivered something that respects the complexity of the site without over-explaining it. The architecture doesn’t lecture you about the quarry’s history. It simply places you inside it. It gives you the height, the steel, the sound, the view, and leaves you to do the thinking.

Public architecture at its best creates a relationship between a person and a place they might not have noticed otherwise. The Southern Lookout does exactly that. Sydney has always had dramatic natural geography. Now, at the edge of a former quarry, it has something that finally lets you see it.

The post Sydney Just Opened a 42-Metre Steel Lookout Over a Former Quarry first appeared on Yanko Design.

8 Best Pens and Writing Instruments That Make You Actually Want to Pick Up a Pen Again

There is an argument happening on desks everywhere, and it is not about productivity systems or the right notebook grid. It is about whether the thing you write with deserves the same design attention as everything else you choose to own. For most people, a pen is a pen. For a small and growing number, it is the one object that connects thought to surface, and that connection is worth getting right. The instruments on this list take that idea seriously.

What unites them is not price or prestige. It is that each one treats the act of writing as a design problem worth solving from the beginning — the weight, the mechanism, the material, the way it sits in the hand before the nib or tip ever touches paper. Some are concepts. Some are products you can order today. All of them make the case that the writing instrument is still one of the most interesting objects in design.

1. Yamaha Swing Scribe

Yamaha’s answer to the question nobody thought to ask — what if a pen had a heartbeat? Part of the brand’s Scribe Tool Design 2024 project, the Swing Scribe draws its logic from the quill: as a feather naturally wobbles under air resistance while writing, it gives the act a physical rhythm. Yamaha made that incidental quality intentional. A weighted tip attached to a metal bar swings as the pen moves, feeding a small, steady pulse back into the hand with every stroke. No batteries. No app. Just physics.

The weight slides along the bar, letting you dial in the arc of the swing to match how you’re writing at any given moment. Pull it close to the pivot for a tighter, faster beat. Let it run wide for slow, deliberate work. This is the kind of design thinking that earns the word Kando — the Japanese concept of emotional resonance that sits at the core of everything Yamaha builds, from concert grands to this pen. It doesn’t make writing faster. It makes it more felt.

What we like:

The pendulum mechanism works without any power source, making it completely self-contained
Adjustable weight position means it adapts to the writer rather than demanding the writer adapt to it

What we dislike:

The swinging arm adds visual complexity that won’t suit every context or desk aesthetic
The concept hasn’t been tested across extended, high-volume writing sessions yet

2. Inseparable Notebook Pen

The premise is embedded in the name. Most pens and notebooks exist in a state of constant near-separation — the pen migrates to a bag, a pocket, another room, and the notebook sits waiting and useless. The Inseparable concept addresses this directly, building pen and notebook as a single resolved object rather than two products that happen to be sold together. The pen lives within the notebook’s architecture rather than being clipped to it as an afterthought, and removing it feels deliberate rather than accidental.

What makes this design interesting isn’t just the integration — it’s that the integration is the premise, and everything else follows from it. The proportions of the pen are dictated by the notebook. The notebook’s form is shaped around the pen’s presence. Neither object is compromised to serve the other, which is harder to achieve than it sounds. When a design solves a problem this specific and this common, it has a right to exist.

Click Here to Buy Now: $19.95

What we like:

Eliminates one of the most common and most irritating failures of the writing ritual entirely
The formal resolution between pen and notebook is tight — neither object feels like a concession

What we dislike:

Integration at this level commits you to one notebook format, limiting flexibility for writers who move between sizes
Writers who prefer their own paper choices will find the pairing restrictive

3. Da Vinci Pencil

Gabrilevich Design’s Da Vinci pencil concept earns its name not through ornamentation but through the kind of cross-disciplinary thinking that made Leonardo’s notebooks worth studying in the first place. The design draws from da Vinci’s own mechanical sketches — the geometry, the visible logic of moving parts, the sense that an object should reveal how it works rather than hide it. The result is a pencil that functions as a small piece of mechanical sculpture, beautiful precisely because nothing about its construction is concealed.

The concept challenges the pencil’s conventional muteness. Most pencils look like nothing in particular. The Da Vinci concept looks like something that was thought about — that has a position, a point of view about what a mark-making tool should communicate about the hand that uses it. Whether it writes better than a standard pencil is beside the point. It writes differently, and it makes you think about the act differently, which is often the more interesting design outcome.

What we like:

Treats a pencil as a vehicle for design philosophy rather than a commodity object
The exposed mechanical logic gives it a conceptual depth that most stationery completely lacks

What we dislike:

Concept-driven designs at this level of visual complexity often struggle in extended daily use
Visible mechanisms can introduce maintenance friction that disrupts the writing ritual

4. Levitating Pen 2.0 Cosmic Meteorite Edition

The levitating pen is a category that could easily slide into novelty, and the original versions of magnetic levitation pens leaned into that direction unapologetically. The 2.0 Cosmic Meteorite Edition changes the conversation by adding material seriousness to the spectacle. The pen itself incorporates genuine meteorite fragment material — iron-nickel alloy from outside the atmosphere — which gives the levitation a context it previously lacked. The object that hovers above its base is, in a measurable sense, from space.

That combination of astronomical material and magnetic suspension creates an object that earns its place on a desk in a way that pure spectacle cannot. It is a writing instrument that happens to be made partly from the oldest solid material you will ever hold, suspended above a surface by the same electromagnetic principles that govern planetary orbits. The writing experience is secondary to what the pen communicates as a resting object, and for a desk piece that doubles as a conversation anchor, that hierarchy is entirely appropriate.

Click Here to Buy Now: $399.00

What we like:

The meteorite material elevates the concept from a gadget to a genuine collectible
The levitation serves the narrative of the material rather than competing with it

What we dislike:

The magnetic base required for levitation eliminates any possibility of portability
Its function as a writing instrument is always secondary to its function as a display object

5. Qui Magnetic Pencil System

Qui operates on the premise that the friction between a pencil and the surface it lives on — a desk, a notebook, a wall — should be designed rather than incidental. The magnetic system allows the pencil to attach and detach from its designated surface with a satisfying, calibrated resistance, making the act of picking it up and setting it down feel considered rather than casual. This is a small interaction, but it happens dozens of times a day, and designing it well changes the quality of the entire writing practice.

The system thinking extends beyond the magnetic connection. The pencil’s geometry is resolved with the mounting surface as part of the design problem, not as a separate accessory. The result is that Qui occupies space well even when not in use, which is most of the time. A pencil that looks intentional when it is sitting still is a harder design challenge than one that merely writes well, and Qui understands that the resting state is part of the design.

What we like:

The system approach treats the pencil and its environment as a single design problem
The resting interaction — picking up and setting down — is as considered as the writing experience itself

What we dislike:

The magnetic system creates a dependency: without its base, the pencil loses its defining characteristic
Committing to a fixed mounting point works against the natural portability of a pencil

6. PENTAPA

Konstantin Diehl’s PENTAPA takes its name and its logic from the pentagon — five sides, each one a resolved surface rather than a generic round barrel. The five-sided form is unusual enough to read as a design decision the moment you pick it up, and practical enough to hold well once you begin writing. Pentagons don’t roll off desks. They register against the fingers in a way that circular barrels don’t, giving you tactile information about the nib’s orientation before the tip reaches paper.

PENTAPA belongs to a tradition of geometric pen design that runs from the hexagonal tradition of rOtring and Kaweco through to contemporary CNC-machined objects, but it finds its own position in that tradition rather than merely referencing it. Five sides is not the expected answer. It is the interesting one — the number that offers enough symmetry to feel resolved and enough irregularity to feel considered. That balance between the expected and the surprising is where most good pen design lives.

What we like:

The pentagonal form solves the rolling problem with more formal interest than a standard hexagon
The five-sided barrel gives the pen a distinct tactile identity that rewards extended daily use

What we dislike:

The unconventional geometry won’t suit every grip style or hand size
Finding a compatible pen case or sleeve requires more effort than standard round or hexagonal barrels

7. Everlasting All-Metal Pencil

The all-metal pencil solves a problem that the pencil has had since its invention: it runs out. A graphite core depletes. A pencil shortens. Eventually, it disappears entirely and takes with it whatever patina or character it had developed through use. The everlasting all-metal pencil replaces graphite with a metal alloy tip — typically an aluminum or similar soft-metal formulation — that deposits a mark through controlled abrasion rather than core consumption. The pencil does not shorten. It does not run out.

The mark is different from graphite — lighter, slightly metallic in tone, with a distinctive quality that serious writers and sketchers tend to either embrace or reject immediately. The design interest is in what remains when the core is removed: a pure metal object whose entire form is determined by how it feels to hold, since there is no pencil-to-grip ratio to manage, no sharpener to carry, no length to account for. The result is one of the most resolved objects in everyday carry design.

Click Here to Buy Now: $19.95

What we like:

Removes the pencil’s built-in obsolescence entirely, changing the object from consumable to permanent
With no core to deplete, the entire form is determined purely by how it feels to hold

What we dislike:

The mark quality is distinct enough from graphite to require genuine adjustment and won’t suit every application
Some writing and sketching tasks — particularly those requiring dense, dark marks — simply don’t translate well to a metal alloy deposit

8. The Bolen

The James Brand has built its reputation on EDC objects with no unnecessary elements — knives, tools, and pens that look like they were designed by someone who uses them. The Bolen is the brand’s pen, and it carries the same design logic as everything else in their catalogue: machined from quality materials, resolved in form, designed to be carried without thought and used with satisfaction. The clip works. The mechanism engages cleanly. The proportions sit right in the hand without adjustment.

What distinguishes the Bolen from most EDC pens is that the James Brand comes from a tool-making tradition rather than a stationery one, which means the pen is designed for carry first and desk presence second. That priority ordering produces a different object than you get from pen-first design — one that is slightly more aggressive in material and slightly more considered in how it lives in a pocket. It is the writing instrument for someone who doesn’t think of themselves as a pen person, and that is exactly who needs it most.

What we like:

The tool-making heritage produces genuine material integrity, with nothing present without a reason for being there
Carry-first design logic makes it the most naturally portable instrument on this list

What we dislike:

The EDC-first approach means it lacks the expressive personality of instruments designed for desk use
Writers who want the pen to feel special on the page rather than merely functional in the pocket may find it underwhelming

The Object in Your Hand Shapes the Thought on the Page

Eight instruments that represent eight different positions on what a writing tool should be. The Yamaha asks what happens when you give a pen a pulse. The Levitating Pen asks what happens when the material itself carries a story. The Bolen asks what happens when you design for the pocket before the page. None of these answers is the same, which is the point. The best design in any category is the kind that expands your sense of what the category can contain.

What they share is the conviction that the instrument matters — that the weight, the mechanism, the material, and the form of the thing in your hand have a real effect on what ends up on the page. That conviction used to belong only to serious writers and professional draughtsmen. The fact that you can now find it in a magnetic pencil system, a levitating desk object, and a pen designed by a motorcycle company suggests the rest of the world is catching up.

The post 8 Best Pens and Writing Instruments That Make You Actually Want to Pick Up a Pen Again first appeared on Yanko Design.

Japan Just Built a Pokémon Footbath and It’s Genuinely Moving

When you hear “Pokémon footbath,” your brain probably goes one of two places: either immediate delight or mild confusion. Both reactions are fair. But when you actually see what just opened in the small coastal town of Wakura Onsen in Nanao City, Japan, the response tends to land somewhere more unexpected than either. It lands in quiet, genuine warmth.

The Wakura Pokémon Footbath officially opened on May 12 inside Yuttari Park in Ishikawa Prefecture, and it is exactly what it sounds like: a public footbath surrounded by beloved Water-type Pokémon. Gyarados towers over the soaking pool, appearing to blast water in with its Hydro Pump. Psyduck perches nearby, looking stressed as always. Vaporeon, Pikachu, Poliwag, Poliwhirl, and Quaxly are scattered throughout the wooden structure, each one in character, each one impossibly charming. The facility is free to use and open daily from 7 AM to 7 PM, though it may close depending on weather conditions.

Designer: Wakura Onsen

From a pure design standpoint, it works. The Pokémon figures feel integrated into the space rather than slapped onto it as an afterthought. The Gyarados placement especially is clever: positioning a creature historically associated with destruction as the one filling a community wellness space with warm water is a quietly subversive design choice. It takes a familiar icon and gives it a new job, and the whole thing is better for it. Good character-led design usually does this. It finds the emotional logic of the IP and builds something genuinely functional around it, instead of just stamping a logo on a wall and calling it a day. The wooden structure keeping everything together also helps ground the Pokémon elements in something tactile and traditionally Japanese, which keeps it from reading as pure merchandise and more as a genuine place to be.

But the design story here is only part of the picture. What elevates the Wakura Pokémon Footbath beyond a cute novelty is the context surrounding it. Wakura Onsen is still recovering from the 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake, which caused major damage to local tourism infrastructure. The footbath was renovated and developed through a collaboration between Nanao City and the Pokémon With You Foundation, an organization that has long used Pokémon’s reach to support communities facing hardship. Local officials are hoping the new attraction will draw visitors back to a region that urgently needs them. On opening day, a dedication ceremony was held, and children from a local nursery school were among the first to try it out.

That detail matters. It reframes the entire project. A giant Gyarados shooting water into a hot spring pool is fun in isolation. A giant Gyarados shooting water into a hot spring pool in a community rebuilding after a disaster, inaugurated by children experiencing something joyful, is a different kind of story. It is design as care. It is pop culture as infrastructure.

I think we underestimate how much deliberate playfulness can do for a place in recovery. A footbath is not a hospital. It is not a new road or a rebuilt building. But public spaces designed to give people a reason to show up, to sit down, to stay a while, do real work. They signal that a place is worth visiting again. That it has something to offer. That life, in some form, is continuing. And sometimes the difference between a place that comes back and one that does not comes down to whether people believe it is worth returning to.

The footbath also ties into the newly installed Pokémon manhole covers placed around Nanao City, part of Japan’s Pokéfuta initiative, which uses collectible Pokémon-themed covers to encourage visitors to explore lesser-known regions. It is a broader ecosystem of soft infrastructure pointing in the same direction: come here, look around, stay awhile.

Wakura Onsen may not be the first destination that comes to mind for a travel itinerary. But a free footbath where a reformed Gyarados keeps your feet warm while Psyduck quietly spirals next to you? That is a genuinely compelling reason to make the trip. And right now, Nanao City could use a few more of those.

The post Japan Just Built a Pokémon Footbath and It’s Genuinely Moving first appeared on Yanko Design.

Most Portable Monitors Are Rigid Slabs, This $1,299 One Folds

Portable monitors have become a legitimate part of the modern mobile workspace, with countless options available across every price range. But almost all of them share one fundamental constraint: they’re flat, rigid panels in protective cases, indistinguishable from each other in form even when they vary in quality. The screen that travels in your bag looks exactly the same as it did before you packed it.

Foldable display technology has been reshaping the smartphone market for years, but making it work meaningfully for laptop accessories has proven far more complicated. Aura Displays’ Single Flex Pro Gen 1 is a portable monitor that does exactly that, introducing FlexMatrix technology that lets the screen bend, fold, and adapt to angles and surfaces that no rigid display can match.

Designer: Aura Displays

Consider what it actually means to carry a second screen around all day. With conventional portable monitors, you’re always working with the same fixed rectangle, propped up at the same angle, regardless of the surface. A display that folds to just 6.1 by 9.3 inches and opens flat in seconds turns that into a fundamentally different proposition: the form factor adapts to the space, not the other way around.

The actual display is a 13.3-inch AMOLED panel with a 1536×2048 resolution at a 3:4 aspect ratio, meaning it’s portrait-oriented rather than the standard widescreen format. That’s a deliberate choice for someone editing a document, annotating a PDF, or reviewing design layouts in a vertical workflow. The screen covers 117% of the NTSC color gamut, with a 2ms response time and touch input support built in.

AMOLED as a panel technology brings practical advantages worth noting. Contrast is technically infinite since each pixel generates its own light and can switch off entirely, so blacks are genuinely black rather than a deep gray approximation. For anyone reviewing color-critical artwork or working on dark-themed interfaces for long stretches, those aren’t trivial differences; they affect how accurately you read what’s on screen throughout the day.

The physical construction is built around pro-grade hinges and a premium aluminum chassis, keeping the whole unit to 1.54lb despite the structural complexity of a panel that needs to flex repeatedly without degrading. Folded, the monitor is just about 0.63 inches thick; unfolded, it drops to 0.31 inches. Connectivity runs entirely through USB-C, plug-and-play, with no drivers or software installations needed before you can start using it.

There’s also a 17-inch version in the works, currently in pre-production and expected to arrive in June 2026. That suggests Aura isn’t treating this as a one-off experiment but as the beginning of a product line built around this flexible form factor. The Gen 1 name further implies future revisions, which is a reasonable expectation for a product type that genuinely hasn’t existed before now.

The Single Flex Pro Gen 1 is on sale at $1,299, down from its regular $1,499 price, available in Midnight Black. It ships with a USB-C to USB-C cable and a USB-C to USB-A adapter, backed by a one-year warranty. For something claiming a genuine category first, that price reflects both the novelty of the technology inside and the engineering required to keep a flexible AMOLED panel reliable through daily use.

The post Most Portable Monitors Are Rigid Slabs, This $1,299 One Folds first appeared on Yanko Design.

SCUF Omega Adds 11 Buttons to the PS5 Controller and One Fewer Excuse

The PlayStation 5’s DualSense controller is genuinely excellent for most kinds of gaming. Haptic feedback and adaptive triggers have added a new layer of immersion to mainstream titles, and the ergonomics are comfortable enough for long sessions. But competitive gaming operates by a different set of priorities, where fractions of a second matter more than vibrating triggers, and the standard pad wasn’t designed with that crowd in mind.

That’s the gap SCUF has been filling for 15 years across multiple platforms, and the Omega marks the first time it’s done so with an officially licensed PS5 controller. Built on feedback from professional players and championship-level esports teams, it doesn’t try to replicate the DualSense so much as rethink the PS5 controller from the ground up for a very specific type of player.

Designer: SCUF Gaming x Sony

The most immediately striking feature is the sheer number of additional inputs. Beyond the standard button layout, the Omega adds four remappable rear paddles at the back, two SAX (Side Action) buttons on the sides of the grip, and five G-Keys near the bottom of the controller, all fully programmable. That’s 11 extra inputs, each of which can be mapped to any action through the SCUF Mobile App.

The rear paddles are the most critical of these for shooters. The whole point is to keep your thumbs planted on the thumbsticks while still executing jumps, crouches, or reloads through the paddles. In a close-range firefight, lifting a thumb to reach a face button even briefly can mean losing the engagement. The SAX buttons expand on this idea further, accessible without shifting your grip even slightly.

Adjustable Instant Triggers give the Omega another competitive edge. Each trigger toggles between a hair-trigger click mode designed for rapid FPS inputs and a full analog range for games that use throttle or feathered inputs. Swapping between those modes takes seconds and doesn’t require a tool. This alone makes the controller feel meaningfully different from the DualSense, not just cosmetically different.

There’s a notable tradeoff, though. The Omega drops adaptive triggers and haptic feedback entirely. Sony’s DualSense Edge made a similar call, only with the adaptive triggers. For SCUF, removing vibration also reduces weight and eliminates the buzz that can subtly disrupt stick control mid-game. The face plate is magnetic and swappable, and the controller connects wirelessly via Bluetooth or USB-A dongle, or wired via USB-C.

The SCUF Omega retails for $219.99 in the US and £209.99 in the UK. It works across PS5, PS5 Pro, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android, so the investment follows you across platforms. It costs more than the DualSense Edge’s closest equivalent, but the extra inputs, swappable face plate, and TMR sticks make a reasonable argument for the premium.

The post SCUF Omega Adds 11 Buttons to the PS5 Controller and One Fewer Excuse first appeared on Yanko Design.

Remember When Rose Gold Took Over Everything? Apple Is Trying That Again With Dark Cherry

Rose Gold did not just sell iPhones. It rewired the consumer electronics industry’s entire relationship with color, spawning a decade of blush-tinted Samsung flagships, Beats headphones, Dell XPS laptops, Dyson hairdryers, and KitchenAid stand mixers that are still arriving on shelves today. Apple introduced it in 2015 with the iPhone 6s, and within eighteen months every major manufacturer had a rose-gold SKU, not because the color was revolutionary but because the sales data was undeniable. Cosmic Orange pulled off a smaller version of that trick with the iPhone 17 Pro, becoming the de facto personality colorway of the lineup and reportedly outperforming expectations at retail. Apple noticed, and for the iPhone 18 Pro, they are reaching for lightning in a bottle again with a finish called Dark Cherry.

Dark Cherry is a deep, wine-red hue that leaked camera cover prototypes have now confirmed as the hero color of the 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max lineup, sitting alongside the more conservative Light Blue, Dark Gray, and Silver. The timing carries its own irony given that a segment of Cosmic Orange iPhone 17 Pro owners have been reporting their units gradually shifting toward a reddish cherry tone over time, which makes Apple’s new colorway feel less like a creative pivot and more like an accidental preview. Whether Dark Cherry becomes the next Rose Gold, something every Android manufacturer from Samsung to OnePlus rushes to clone by mid-2027, will depend entirely on how the color reads in the real world rather than in leaked silicone covers.

Designer: Apple

The same leaks that confirmed Dark Cherry also tell us that the rear camera layout holds steady from the 17 Pro generation, with a slightly thicker camera plateau accommodating the new primary sensor. That sensor is a 48MP variable aperture unit, a meaningful upgrade that gives the 18 Pro genuine optical flexibility rather than the fixed-aperture approach every iPhone before it has used. The thicker module is a reasonable trade-off for what variable aperture actually delivers in low light and in bright outdoor conditions, and the accompanying iOS 27 camera app, reportedly rebuilt from the ground up as a pro-grade tool, suggests Apple is treating the entire capture pipeline as a system rather than isolated hardware specs.

We’ve addressed the speculation around the changes on the front too. The Dynamic Island is allegedly shrinking by approximately 25 percent, a reduction that sounds modest until you factor in how much screen real estate that cutout currently consumes on the 17 Pro. Tighter bezels are also in the mix, pushing the display closer to the edges and giving the front face a density that the current generation does not quite achieve. These are the kinds of incremental refinements that read as minor in a spec comparison but register immediately when you pick the phone up.

Underneath all of it sits the 2nm A20 Pro chip, Apple’s first processor built on TSMC’s second-generation 2nm process node. The performance and efficiency gains from moving to 2nm are expected to be substantial, particularly for the on-device Apple Intelligence workloads that Siri’s expanded capabilities will demand. Apple has been positioning its silicon advantage as the reason to stay in the ecosystem, and the A20 Pro is the clearest expression of that argument yet.

The one narrative the iPhone 18 Pro cannot fully control is the company sharing a stage with the foldable iPhone Ultra at the same September event. A first-generation foldable from Apple will absorb the room’s attention regardless of what the Pro brings, which means Dark Cherry has real work to do as a visual hook. If the color lands the way Cosmic Orange did, and if the Rose Gold instinct proves correct, the 18 Pro will find its audience on color alone while the spec sheet closes the deal.

The post Remember When Rose Gold Took Over Everything? Apple Is Trying That Again With Dark Cherry first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Portable Keyboard Has a 13-Inch 4K Touchscreen Built In, and It Fits in Your Laptop Sleeve

Closed, the VitaLink looks like a very flat book, silver, about the footprint of a large paperback, with nothing to suggest it carries a 4K display inside. At 20mm thick with a CNC-machined aluminum shell, it weighs 1200 grams and travels the way a slim notebook does; it fits in a laptop sleeve, takes up a predictable corner of a bag, and requires no dedicated case beyond what you already carry. Then it unfolds at 180 degrees. The screen lifts above the keyboard, the whole unit settles into a 34 by 15 centimeter footprint, and what you have is a self-contained dual-screen workspace that happened to be a thin slab a moment ago.

The keyboard is the part that usually betrays products like this. Portable keyboards compress key spacing to save millimeters, shorten travel to save thickness, and leave you typing on something that feels like a shallow membrane rather than actual keys. VitaLink went in the opposite direction, widening key spacing to 3.27mm and setting travel at 0.8mm, with scissor switches tuned for speed and quiet actuation. The display above it runs at 3840×1600 with a 2.4:1 aspect ratio, a cinematic proportion that gives the screen an unusually wide horizontal span, well-suited to keeping a reference panel open alongside a working document without feeling like you’re squinting at either side.

Designer: VitaLink

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The resolution translates to 298 pixels per inch, which puts it in the same territory as Apple’s Retina displays and well above the pixel density of most portable monitors in this category. Text holds sharp at native scaling, fine details in images stay crisp, and the 60Hz refresh rate keeps touch input feeling immediate. Ten-point multitouch means gestures respond the way they do on a tablet, with swipes, pinches, and drags registering without lag. The screen covers 100 percent of the sRGB color gamut, which makes it viable for color-sensitive work where you need confidence that what you see on the display matches what the final output will deliver. That 2.4:1 ratio keeps showing up as the design’s defining decision; it gives you enough horizontal real estate to run a code editor with a console window beside it, or a timeline with a preview panel, without either side feeling like it’s been compressed into a narrow strip.

Typing on the VitaLink is designed to feel deliberate in a way that most travel keyboards do not. The 0.8mm of key travel sits in a range where the keys actuate fast but still give tactile confirmation that you pressed them, a balance that makes a difference during long writing sessions where you need speed without sacrificing accuracy. The 3.27mm key spacing is wider than what most compact keyboards offer, eliminating that cramped sensation where your fingers feel like they’re hunting for keys in tight quarters. RGB backlighting runs through three modes, activated with function key shortcuts: a breathing gradient, a solid single-color backlight, and a rainbow wave that ripples across the keys as you type. The backlighting does actual work in low-light environments, but the rainbow mode leans more toward visual flair than strict utility.

CNC machining means the aluminum body starts as a solid block and gets precision-carved, producing the kind of structural rigidity that protects the screen during transit and prevents flex when you’re typing hard. The 180-degree hinge lets the unit lay completely flat, which matters both for stability on uneven surfaces and for low-angle use when you’re working on a cramped airplane tray table or a café counter. Dual USB-C ports handle video, data, and power delivery up to 65W, so a single cable from your laptop, tablet, or phone brings the display to life with no drivers to install. Compatibility spans Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android, with plug-and-play recognition across all of them. Connect a Steam Deck or a Nintendo Switch via USB-C, and the VitaLink becomes a 13-inch 4K external display for handheld gaming, turning a small console screen into something considerably more immersive.

VitaLink offers eight keyboard layout options, covering US Windows (the default), US Mac, German QWERTZ, Japanese JIS, UK, French AZERTY, Nordic, Italian, and Spanish. The standard US Windows layout ships at no extra cost; upgrading to US Mac adds ten dollars, German or Japanese layouts add twenty, and UK, French, Nordic, Italian, or Spanish layouts add thirty. The layouts require specific laser engraving and dedicated production runs, so they’re available as optional add-ons rather than default configurations. You select your preferred layout during checkout or in a post-campaign survey if you miss it the first time.

VitaLink is currently available on Kickstarter starting at $299, down from a retail price of $658. The package includes the VitaLink keyboard and display unit plus two USB-C cables. Eight keyboard layout options are available as add-ons, including US Mac, German QWERTZ, Japanese JIS, UK, French AZERTY, Nordic, Italian, and Spanish, with upgrade fees ranging from $10 to $30 depending on the layout. Shipping is scheduled for September 2026, with delivery fees ranging from approximately $18 to $33 depending on region. VitaLink covers all taxes and customs duties, so the listed shipping fee is the only additional cost beyond the pledge amount.

Click Here to Buy Now: $299 $658 (55% off). Hurry, only 379/600 left! Raised over $286,000.

The post This Portable Keyboard Has a 13-Inch 4K Touchscreen Built In, and It Fits in Your Laptop Sleeve first appeared on Yanko Design.

Mass Timber, Passive House, & a Curving Roof: This Canadian Community Centre Is the Civic Building Other Cities Should Be Copying

There’s a version of a public building that checks all the sustainability boxes and still feels cold, institutional, and somehow indifferent to the people it’s meant to serve. The new Marpole Community Centre is not that building. Designed by Diamond Schmitt for the City of Vancouver and the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation, it’s nearing completion in Oak Park. It quietly resets expectations for what a civic facility can be.

The project replaces a well-loved but outgrown facility with a two-storey structure nearly double its size, measuring 5,000 square metres. The program is generous: a gymnasium, fitness centre, field house, multi-purpose rooms for seniors and youth, and a 74-space childcare facility. Underground parking is tucked beneath the building to protect the surrounding natural vegetation, letting Oak Park remain exactly that — a park.

Design: Diamond Schmitt

What makes the architecture worth paying attention to is the mass timber. Rather than limiting wood to the roof structure, as institutional buildings often do, the Marpole Community Centre uses a comprehensive mass timber frame — glulam columns and beams, a CLT floor system, and a long-span upper roof built from steel wide flange beams and a CLT deck. The result is a structure that reads as warm and considered, not engineered into submission. Exposed throughout the interior, the timber gives the building a human scale that concrete rarely allows.

The signature move is the gently curving roof. The doubly curved cantilever form, supported by long-span steel beams, required close coordination between the design team and contractors — but the payoff is an exterior that feels unified without being monotonous, and an interior where the ceiling becomes the experience. Strategic glazing pulls the landscape in, connecting occupants to Oak Park’s natural setting without sacrificing energy performance.

On the sustainability front, the numbers are serious. The building targets Passive House and LEED Gold certifications and has achieved a 41% reduction in embodied carbon. It’s also a pilot project for the City of Vancouver’s Embodied Carbon Guidelines, meaning lessons learned here will directly shape future civic buildings across the city. The project is also pursuing the CAGBC’s Zero Carbon Building Design Standard.

Beyond the technical performance, the centre was designed with inclusion, equity, and Indigenous cultural representation as core principles — not afterthoughts bolted on at the end. For a neighbourhood as diverse as Marpole, that intentionality matters. A community centre tends to be the most democratic building a city can build. This one makes a strong case that it can also be among its most thoughtful.

The post Mass Timber, Passive House, & a Curving Roof: This Canadian Community Centre Is the Civic Building Other Cities Should Be Copying first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Designer’s Ferrari SC250 Concept Takes the Legendary 250 GTO to Its Logical Extreme

Only 36 Ferrari 250 GTOs were ever built between 1962 and 1964, and one of them sold privately for $70 million in 2018. The body was shaped by Sergio Scaglietti working metal directly over the frame, piece by piece, without drawings, which means the most valuable car in the world was essentially hand-sculpted from instinct and aerodynamic necessity. Giotto Bizzarrini refined the GTO’s form through wind tunnel testing at the University of Pisa and extensive track sessions at Monza, chasing tenths through aluminum curvature at a time when the science of aerodynamics was barely a decade old. The result was a long, low nose, muscular flanks, and a Kamm-tail rear that looked inevitable rather than designed. That visual logic, equal parts science and poetry, is what makes the 250 GTO the single hardest car in automotive history to reimagine credibly.

India-based designer Krishnakanta Saikhom, a mechanical engineering graduate and National Institute of Design alumnus whose Lamborghini Massacre concept we covered on these pages, decided to try anyway. His Ferrari SC250 concept plants a provocative question at Maranello’s feet: what if the 250 GTO’s aerodynamic DNA had been allowed to keep evolving for sixty years, unconstrained by road regulations, homologation rules, or production economics? The SC250 answers by stretching the GTO’s proportional logic into Le Mans Hypercar territory, wrapping a dramatically low, wide body in Rosso Corsa and staging it directly alongside the original in the renders. The juxtaposition is deliberate and devastating. The ancestor looks delicate. The descendant looks like it wants to consume the atmosphere.

Designer: Krishnakanta Saikhom

From the side profile, the most direct visual conversation with the 250 GTO happens through proportion rather than surface decoration. Saikhom has preserved the long-nose, short-tail logic of the original, but stretched everything laterally and pushed the greenhouse rearward until it sits almost over the rear axle, compressing the visual mass of the cabin into something that reads more like a fighter jet canopy than a traditional coupe roof. The fastback line drops sharply into a truncated tail equipped with a pronounced multi-element rear wing, a detail that the original GTO gestured toward with its modest spoiler and that the SC250 takes to its aerodynamic conclusion. The flanks are clean and tumblehome is aggressive, with the body visibly wider at the rear haunches than at the shoulder line, generating the kind of planted visual stance that makes a car look fast even in a still image.

The front end is where Saikhom makes his boldest departure from GTO orthodoxy. Where the original wore a relatively narrow, rounded nose with small paired air intakes, the SC250 arrives with a full-width splitter assembly that consumes most of the front fascia, flanked by deep aerodynamic channels that feed air under and around the bodywork. A small prancing horse badge sits centered on the nose panel above the splitter, almost understated against the aggression of the aero package surrounding it. The twin vertical gill vents on the front quarter panels directly echo the 250 GTO’s signature side intakes, which is the most explicit heritage callout in the entire design and the one that ties the sixty-year conversation together most convincingly.

The rear is the SC250’s most purposeful face. Four circular exhaust outlets are stacked vertically in pairs on the rear panel, flanked by a carbon-fiber diffuser that rises aggressively from the undertray, and the “SC250” designation is stamped into the bodywork just above the lower valance. The multi-element rear wing sits on twin end plates and reads as a structural aero component rather than a styling accessory, consistent with the car’s overall refusal to treat aerodynamics as decoration. Michelin-shod five-spoke wheels in deep graphite fill the arches at all four corners, and their star-spoke geometry echoes, probably intentionally, the classic cross-spoke alloys that the period 250 GTO wore on its wire-spoked rims.

Saikhom stages the SC250 directly alongside a period 250 GTO in several of the key compositions, and it is a brave editorial choice that pays off completely. The original reads as something assembled from courage and aluminum by people making up the rules in real time. The SC250 reads as the logical destination of the journey those people started. Whether Ferrari would ever sanction something this uncompromising as an official concept is a separate question, and honestly an irrelevant one. What Saikhom has demonstrated is that the 250 GTO’s design language is durable enough to survive extrapolation into a completely different performance era without losing its identity, which is precisely what separates a genuinely great design language from one that only looks good frozen in its original context.

The post This Designer’s Ferrari SC250 Concept Takes the Legendary 250 GTO to Its Logical Extreme first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Table Lets Four Woods Melt Into One Beautiful Gradient

The Color Gradient Table is a piece that understands something very simple, but often overlooked: wood already has color. It does not need to be overly treated, disguised, or forced into becoming something else. Instead, this design begins by paying attention to the natural tones already present in different wood species, arranging them into a subtle but intentional color scale. The result is a table that feels both designed and discovered, as if the material itself guided the form.

The idea is built around a gradual transition of woods, moving from beech to chestnut, European oak, and finally black-stained chestnut. The shift is quiet, but it gives the piece a strong visual rhythm. It moves from pale warmth to deeper, richer tones without feeling decorative or forced. The color is coming from the wood itself, which makes the gradient feel honest and grounded.

Designer: Luis Gimeno

There is something incredibly satisfying about the way the different sections sit together. Each part has its own character, yet the full piece feels completely resolved. The joins and transitions create a sense of order that feels calm, precise, and almost meditative. It has that rare quality where the more you look, the more you notice: the change in tone, the grain, the weight of the form, the way one wood leads into the next.

Because of its size and weight, this is not a table meant to be moved around casually. It is designed to occupy a special place in the house. Once placed, it becomes part of the room’s identity. It feels grounded, almost architectural, like an object that was meant to live in one exact spot and quietly hold the space around it.

The soft edges make a big difference. They prevent the table from feeling too heavy or severe, even though it clearly has mass. That rounded form gives it the feeling of a modern, polished trunk in the room. It still carries a memory of the tree, but in a refined and contemporary way. It feels natural without leaning rustic, sculptural, without feeling dramatic.

What makes the Color Gradient Table so compelling is its restraint. It does not rely on ornament or visual noise. Its strength comes from material, proportion, and the careful relationship between each wooden element. It adds to a subtle natural aesthetic in a way that feels warm, permanent, and deeply considered. It is the kind of piece that does not need to announce itself loudly; it simply belongs.

The post This Table Lets Four Woods Melt Into One Beautiful Gradient first appeared on Yanko Design.