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ROG Just Made Gaming Peripherals You’d Actually Put on Display

Gaming peripherals have gradually crossed from purely functional tools into design objects that enthusiasts keep, display, and collect alongside their builds. Limited-edition anniversary hardware has become part of that culture, giving manufacturers a chance to honor their history while reminding the community why certain names still carry weight. Making those commemorative pieces feel genuinely worthy of the occasion, however, is always the trickier part.

ROG, short for ASUS’ Republic of Gamers brand, is marking 20 years of gaming innovation with an anniversary lineup centered on a gold-and-black design identity it calls the Edition 20 colorway. Three peripheral additions sit at the heart of it, namely the Azoth Extreme Edition 20 keyboard, the Harpe II Extreme Edition 20 mouse, and the Keycap Mystery Box Edition 20, each making the case that high-performance hardware and collector-worthy design don’t have to live separately.

Designer: ASUS

The Azoth Extreme Edition 20 is a 75% gaming keyboard that wears the anniversary theme without being heavy-handed about it. Translucent keycaps reveal the mechanics below, and a detachable 24K-gold-plated nameplate at the front makes the occasion official without being excessive. The extended silicone wrist rest adds completeness to the package, anchored by a gold-toned aluminum-alloy base that ties everything together without introducing anything out of place.

Beneath that exterior, an adjustable gasket mount toggles between Hard and Soft typing modes, useful for anyone who games and types for long hours in the same session. The custom ROG NX Edition 20 mechanical switches are transparent, factory pre-lubed, and hot-swappable, while an OLED touchscreen with a three-way control knob handles quick adjustments. In 2.4GHz wireless mode, battery life stretches to up to 1,600 hours.

The Harpe II Extreme Edition 20 shares the same design language and makes a natural companion to the keyboard. Built on the pro-tested shape of the Harpe II Ace, it houses a 24K-gold-plated metal interior frame inside a crystal-clear shell, with an RGB light guide plate illuminating the components within. A display case ships with the mouse in the box, which feels entirely appropriate given how it looks at rest.

The ROG AimPoint Pro 65K sensor delivers 65,000 dpi with less than 1% CPI deviation and 8,000Hz wireless polling through ROG SpeedNova technology. At 82g with glass mouse feet already included, it’s ready for competitive play immediately. Battery life holds at up to 90 hours over 2.4GHz RF and 98.5 hours in Bluetooth mode, both measured with the lighting switched off.

For those who aren’t swapping out their entire setup, the Keycap Mystery Box Edition 20 is the most accessible entry into the anniversary series. Each box holds a randomly selected keycap in one of seven designs inspired by iconic ROG peripherals and the ROG Fearless Eye logo, built through casting, high-pressure forming, hand-painted finishing, and structural assembly. The obsidian-inspired base and refined detailing make each piece genuinely display-worthy.

The ROG Claymore design is the one most worth watching for, as it includes two interlocking keycaps that reference the original keyboard’s modular layout. A Special Edition crystal-like ROG Logo keycap is also in the pool. Available as a single unit or a six-piece box with no duplicates, the Mystery Box turns 20 years of ROG hardware history into something you can keep in the palm of your hand.

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ROG Just Gave the Ally Its First OLED and a 171-Inch AR Screen

Handheld gaming PCs have become serious pieces of hardware over the past few years, and the display has quietly become the most contested spec on the spec sheet. Early handhelds shipped with IPS panels as a matter of course, but expectations have shifted. Owners of these devices spend long hours staring at a relatively small screen, and the quality of that screen now shapes how the whole experience is judged.

ROG is marking 20 years as a brand with an anniversary bundle that puts its most significant Ally upgrade to date front and center. The ROG XBOX Ally X20 is a special-edition take on the Ally X, built around a translucent black chassis with a gold internal structure and a 7.4-inch OLED display, the first of its kind on an Ally, paired in the box with a set of AR gaming glasses.

Designer: ASUS

The jump from IPS to OLED on the Ally is hard to overstate for anyone who’s spent time with both panel types. The Nebula HDR Display delivers 1,400 nits of peak brightness, a 0.2ms response time, a 120Hz refresh rate with FreeSync Premium Pro, and support for Dolby Vision. VESA DisplayHDR 1000 certification rounds it out, and Corning DXC glass with an anti-reflective coating cuts glare by 65%.

Under the hood, the AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme processor carries the same horsepower as the Ally X, backed by 24GB of RAM and an 80Wh battery. New TMR joysticks deliver better precision and tracking. Auto SR upscaling handles frame-quality boosts at lower power costs, and Xbox Mode offers a clean, console-like interface for navigating a library that spans Xbox, PC Game Pass, and Steam.

The design is the most conspicuous part of the X20’s identity. The translucent black body lets the gold-accented internal frame show through, making the engineering itself part of the aesthetic. It’s a specific kind of flex that ROG’s anniversary context earns credibility for. Rubberized coating on the rear handgrips keeps the feel practical rather than purely decorative, which matters for a device meant to hold through long gaming sessions.

The bundle’s second piece is the ROG XREAL R1 Edition 20 Gaming AR Glasses, and they’re the part that makes this package genuinely different from simply selling a revised Ally X. These aren’t the kind of smart glasses that surface notifications or track fitness. They’re designed specifically for gaming, using dual Sony Micro-OLED displays to generate a virtual screen sized for long sessions away from a TV or monitor.

That virtual screen projects to 171 inches when viewed from 4 meters, covering 95% of the focused field of view. A 240Hz refresh rate and a 0.01ms response time keep fast-paced gameplay clean without smearing or lag. Native 3DoF head tracking anchors the display to your gaze, while Anchor Mode locks it in a fixed position for those who prefer to play without the screen following their movements.

The ROG XBOX Ally X20 isn’t the kind of hardware upgrade that quietly adds a spec or two. OLED on the Ally for the first time, combined with AR glasses that project a room-filling virtual display and wrapped in a translucent anniversary design, makes for a more complete idea than a typical limited-edition product usually delivers. A holiday 2026 release means the wait still has some time left.

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The Surface Laptop Ultra Just Got NVIDIA’s Answer to Apple Silicon

The laptop has always been a machine of compromises. Workstation-class performance typically arrived in thick chassis with short battery life and fan noise audible from across a room. Getting genuine power in a form factor thin and light enough to carry without a second thought has been largely Apple’s territory, a problem it’s been solving with its own ARM-based chips while Windows machines played catch-up.

NVIDIA is changing that calculus for Windows with RTX Spark, an ARM-based superchip that fuses a 20-core Grace CPU with a Blackwell RTX GPU carrying 6,144 CUDA cores, connected by NVIDIA’s NVLink-C2C chip-to-chip interconnect. Microsoft built the Surface Laptop Ultra around it from the silicon up, designing the machine and the chip in concert, producing what it describes as the most powerful Surface Laptop ever built.

Designer: Microsoft, NVIDIA

The reason ARM architecture matters for laptop design is power efficiency. Compared to x86 chips, ARM-based designs deliver significantly more performance per watt, and that ratio determines what’s physically possible in a chassis. RTX Spark laptops are engineered to be as slim as 14mm and as light as 3 pounds, proportions that previously excluded any serious dedicated GPU from the equation entirely.

The Surface Laptop Ultra lands at under 18mm thick and under 4.5 pounds, housed in CNC-machined aluminum in Platinum and Nightfall finishes. The 15-inch mini-LED PixelSense Ultra touchscreen reaches up to 2,000 nits of peak HDR brightness with a 3:2 aspect ratio and 262 pixels per inch, making it the brightest display Microsoft has ever shipped on a Surface. A full port set, including HDMI, USB-C, USB-A, SD card, and headphone jack, rounds out a machine designed for professional use.

RTX Spark’s most defining architectural choice is unified memory, where up to 128GB of RAM is shared dynamically between the CPU and GPU. A 3D rendering job, a video edit, and a locally running AI model can all draw from that same pool simultaneously, without the bottlenecks discrete memory architectures create. That arrangement enables 1 petaflop of AI compute, enough to run 120-billion-parameter models entirely on the device.

The full CUDA software stack runs natively on RTX Spark, which matters directly for creative professionals. Adobe is rebuilding Photoshop and Premiere from the ground up for the chip, targeting 2x faster AI and graphics performance. On the creative side, RTX Spark handles 12K video editing, renders 90GB-plus 3D scenes using NVIDIA OptiX, and generates 4K AI video, tasks that previously required a dedicated workstation to complete without serious compromise.

NVIDIA describes RTX Spark as the most efficient PC chip ever built, a statement aimed squarely at Apple Silicon’s grip on the high-end creative laptop market. That efficiency is also what allows the Surface Laptop Ultra’s all-new thermal system to sustain heavy workloads without the throttling and fan noise that defined previous Windows machines in this tier. Microsoft’s own engineers worked across mechanical, thermal, materials, and industrial design disciplines simultaneously, treating the chassis and the chip as a single system.

All-day battery life holds even while running on battery power, and the compact charger is small enough to fit in a jacket pocket. The Surface Laptop Ultra and additional RTX Spark-powered devices from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and MSI are expected in fall 2026. For a platform that has long asked users to choose between portability and capability, the arrival of an ARM PC chip in NVIDIA’s hands changes the terms of that conversation considerably.

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ASUS Just Returned to Tablets, and It’s Coming for the iPad

Android tablets have had a complicated few years. The iPad solidified its lead at the premium end, and Android alternatives often competed on price rather than experience, producing devices that were acceptable but rarely compelling. Demand for something that genuinely rivaled the best tablets in the room, not on price alone, but on the quality of the thing itself, has been there for a while. It just hasn’t always been answered.

ASUS steps back into the conversation with the Pad, an Android 16 tablet announced at Computex 2026. The company stepped away from the tablet category for several years, and this is its return, built around a 12.2-inch dual-layer OLED display and a chassis light enough and slim enough to suggest that sitting on the couch with it for three hours isn’t something to plan around.

Designer: ASUS

The display is the obvious starting point, because the choice of dual-layer OLED is a meaningful one. Where a conventional OLED pushes through a single emission layer, the tandem structure stacks two of them. The result is better brightness, longer panel life, and improved power efficiency without demanding that any of those things trade off against each other. At a 2.8K resolution, 144Hz refresh rate, and full DCI-P3 coverage, the screen is built for content that benefits from all of that.

The body that carries it measures just 6.5mm thick and weighs 523g, built from a magnalium chassis with a fiberglass back. Those proportions bring the Pad well within the range of a device someone would actually carry in a bag or hold over a long flight without a second thought. Four speakers tuned with Dolby Atmos back up the display with audio that punches harder than the form factor suggests.

A MediaTek Dimensity 8300 chip handles the performance side, paired with 8GB of LPDDR5x RAM and storage in 128GB or 256GB configurations. A micro TF slot extends that to 1TB, keeping the device practical for anyone loading it with locally stored video or large files. The 9,000mAh battery charges to 50% in 30 minutes at 45W, and Wi-Fi 6E keeps the streaming side of things moving.

Software runs Android 16 with a handful of genuinely useful additions. ASUS GlideX handles cross-device connectivity, letting the tablet function as a secondary screen or swap files with a nearby laptop. Google Gemini integrates directly into the experience for AI assistance, while Circle to Search lets users search from anything visible on screen without disrupting what they’re doing. Face Login handles security without a passcode step.

Accessory support rounds out what the Pad can do when the watching stops. ASUS Pen 2.0 enables handwriting and sketching, and Bluetooth keyboard support turns the tablet into something closer to a light laptop for longer text work. A protective case with a multi-angle origami stand ships in the box, meaning the setup is functional out of the packaging without anything additional to buy. Availability and pricing haven’t been confirmed yet, but the ASUS Pad is shaping up as a considered answer to a market that doesn’t always reward patience.

The post ASUS Just Returned to Tablets, and It’s Coming for the iPad first appeared on Yanko Design.

KLH’s $1,000 Floorstanding Speaker Actually Fits in Your Apartment

Serious hi-fi speakers have long demanded a certain kind of listener, one with a dedicated room, a generously sized space, and the freedom to place enclosures wherever the acoustics dictate. That’s a fine arrangement for a fortunate few, but most people live in apartments, condos, and first homes where the furniture stays where it is, and the speakers need to fit around it, not the other way around.

KLH Audio has spent nearly seven decades building speakers for exactly that reality, and the Model Four is its latest expression of it. Unveiled at High End Vienna 2026, it’s a three-way acoustic suspension loudspeaker designed to fill the gap between the bookshelf-sized Model Three and the fuller Model Five, bringing genuine floorstanding performance into a cabinet compact enough to sit comfortably close to a wall.

Designer: KLH Audio

The technology that makes this possible is acoustic suspension, the sealed-enclosure design that KLH pioneered in the 1950s. Unlike ported enclosures, which become muddy and bloated when pushed against a wall or tucked into a corner, a sealed cabinet performs consistently wherever it lands. The Model Four delivers tight, accurate bass with just a few inches of rear clearance, a freedom that ported designs simply can’t match.

The cabinet measures 26 inches tall and just 8.25 inches deep, making it the shallowest floorstanding speaker in KLH’s lineup. The included 6-degree slanted riser adds the angle needed to align the tweeter and midrange with the listener, bringing the total depth to just under 11 inches. That’s narrower than many bookshelves and considerably thinner than the floor plans most audiophile floorstanders require before they’ll sound right.

Inside the sealed, reinforced MDF enclosure is a three-driver system assembled from the best parts of the broader Model Collection. An 8-inch pulp-paper cone woofer reaches down to 46Hz, a 4-inch pulp-paper midrange handles vocals and instruments with the same clarity that earned Model Five its reputation, and a 1-inch aluminum dome tweeter extends the response to 20,000Hz. Power handling reaches 150 watts, with peaks up to 600 watts.

Not every room sounds the same, which is why KLH carried over its three-position Acoustic Balance Control switch, a feature the brand introduced in the 1960s. It gives listeners a way to adjust the mid and high-frequency character to match their room’s natural acoustics, a practical acknowledgment that the speaker will land in spaces KLH can’t anticipate. Five-way gold-plated binding posts handle connectivity on the back panel.

The visual side of the package is equally considered. KLH’s mid-century modern design language shows up in the knit grilles and wood-veneer cabinetry, available in English Walnut with a Stonewash Knit Grille, Black Ash with a Grey Knit Grille, and White Oak with a Black Knit Grille. The matte black riser stand ships with the speaker, keeping the total out-of-pocket cost honest from the start.

The Model Four arrives in September 2026 through premium audio dealers and directly from KLH Audio, priced at $999.99 per speaker, or $1,999.98 per pair, with a 10-year warranty and the riser stand already included. For anyone who has spent years making peace with bookshelf speakers because larger alternatives demanded a dedicated room, it’s the kind of offer that closes the argument.

The post KLH’s $1,000 Floorstanding Speaker Actually Fits in Your Apartment first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Carbon-Negative Neighborhood in the Netherlands Is Rethinking Affordable Housing

Architecture has long been one of the planet’s most significant contributors to carbon emissions. ORGA, a Dutch studio, is challenging that reality head-on with a carbon-negative neighborhood prototype built in the village of Marknesse, Netherlands — and the results are worth paying attention to.

Commissioned by housing association Mercatus, the project consists of 12 affordable rental homes designed specifically for first-time buyers and low-income households. From the outset, the goal was to minimize environmental impact at every stage — not as an afterthought, but as the foundation of every design decision made.

Designer: ORGA

Marknesse sits in a region historically defined by its ‘Delft Red’ aesthetic: red clay bricks and orange-red roof tiles. Rather than abandon that visual identity, ORGA reinterpreted it through a modern lens, swapping out high-carbon materials for natural, renewable alternatives. The result is something rare in contemporary construction — a structure that stores more carbon than it produces. The architects also wove local ecology into the design, incorporating wooden chimneys that double as nesting sites for bats.

The numbers behind the project are striking. The prototype achieves a 76% share of bio-based and circular raw materials. Nearly everything is sourced from renewable materials, with the exception of the concrete foundation and essential components like windows and fasteners. It’s an approach that echoes projects like the 3D-printed Lib Earth House Model B in Japan, which similarly replaces cement with soil-based mixtures to reduce material impact.

Construction efficiency was also a priority. The homes are built using prefabricated timber elements manufactured off-site and assembled on-site, a method that dramatically cuts construction time while reducing local disruption. This mirrors what’s been seen in mass timber projects like the 230 Royal York tower in Toronto, where prefabrication trimmed months off the build schedule.

Inside, the timber framing is insulated with wood fiber and other natural materials, enabling a completely foil-free, vapor-permeable construction. There are no synthetic plastic wrapping layers. Instead, the wall system is breathable — designed to passively regulate moisture and temperature without air conditioning or mechanical intervention. The building essentially manages its own climate.

To close the loop on long-term sustainability, each home was cataloged using the Madaster Material Passport, an online dossier that tracks all materials and their applications. Residents also received user manuals to help them maintain and eventually repurpose components of the home. What ORGA has built in Marknesse is more than a prototype. It’s a proof of concept that bio-based, affordable, and carbon-negative architecture can coexist — and that meaningful ecological design doesn’t have to come at the cost of accessibility.

The post This Carbon-Negative Neighborhood in the Netherlands Is Rethinking Affordable Housing first appeared on Yanko Design.

Oppo Made A MagSafe Display Accessory That Lets You Take Better Selfies With Your Rear Camera

The rear camera has always been the better camera. That has been true for over a decade. Every benchmark, every low-light comparison, every zoom test confirms it, and yet selfie culture built itself entirely around the front-facing lens because there was no practical way to see what the good camera was capturing while it was pointed away from you. Oppo’s answer to that decade-old inconvenience is a circular magnetic screen that clips to the back of your phone and mirrors your rear camera’s live feed. Frame your shot, check your composition, tap to shoot, all without guessing.

Launched in China on May 25, 2026, the Oppo Bubble pairs with select devices in the Reno 16 lineup and streams a camera preview wirelessly up to 10 meters away. That range alone repositions it as a proper remote shooting monitor, useful well beyond selfies. The Bubble runs on a 550mAh battery, uses a circular AMOLED touchscreen, and supports custom wallpapers and media display when the camera preview is off. Apple has had the magnetic infrastructure for something like this since 2020. Six years on, the most ambitious MagSafe accessory in the lineup is still a card holder.

Designer: Oppo

Deep blacks, punchy colors, and a circular silhouette that reads more like tech jewelry than a utilitarian panel, the Bubble’s AMOLED touchscreen is the hardware doing the heaviest lifting in the whole concept. A washed-out, low-res preview would sink this accessory at its primary job, so putting a real AMOLED in here is arguably the secret sauce. The round form factor earns its keep on the design side too, giving the Bubble enough personality to avoid looking like a rectangular chunk glued to a phone case. Beyond the camera preview, Oppo lets you load it up with custom wallpapers, live photos, videos, and animated themes, so it has a visual life even when you’re not actively shooting. Yes, you can even load your boarding pass on it to show at the airport. No, you can’t play DOOM on it… yet.

Ten meters of wireless range turns the Bubble from a selfie tool into a legitimate remote shooting monitor, and Oppo built a remote shutter trigger in to go with it. At arm’s length, you’re checking your own framing before you tap. At 10 meters, you’re monitoring a camera on a tripod across the room, or confirming a group shot is actually composed before everyone has to reassemble for attempt number six. People used to buy separate Bluetooth remotes to approximate half of that workflow. The Bubble folds it into one small circular screen that lives on the back of the phone, which makes you wonder why no one shipped this sooner.

The live camera preview only works with select Oppo devices from the Reno 16 series it launched alongside, which means the headline feature is gated to a short device list even within Oppo’s own lineup at launch. That’s a real limitation for now, and one worth naming plainly before you get too deep into the pitch. Oppo has also teased a pendant variant of the Bubble, suggesting it has a standalone life beyond being phone-mounted, though whether that version carries the camera preview or strips back to a display has not been confirmed. The fact that Oppo is already thinking in form factor variations points toward a platform they intend to iterate on. Whether the compatibility net widens with the next generation is the question worth watching.

A rear camera selfie monitor that works 10 meters out, snaps on magnetically, and runs on a proper AMOLED display covers a gap that millions of people navigate every single day with timer sprints and front cameras they’ve quietly settled for. The Bubble is currently available in China, with no confirmed international rollout yet. Apple has had MagSafe on iPhones since 2020, built a respectable ecosystem of wallets, chargers, and cases around it, and left the screen real estate entirely untouched. Oppo just claimed it. How aggressively they expand the Bubble beyond a single phone series in a single market will say a lot about whether they actually believe in what they’ve built here.

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Ultrahuman Ring PRO’s 15-Day Battery Removes the Main Reason to Quit

Most wearables make a generous promise: that daily wear will eventually help you understand your body better. In practice, though, many end up on a nightstand by Tuesday because the battery died or the data was too much to decode. The market for health wearables has grown quickly, but the friction hasn’t cleared as fast as the feature lists have gotten longer.

Smart rings have been one answer to that problem. They’re smaller, quieter, and don’t ask for your attention the way a smartwatch does. Ultrahuman’s Ring PRO is the company’s third-generation take on that idea, and it comes with a compact Mini Charger built around the same philosophy. Together, they’re designed to make health tracking feel like something running in the background rather than a habit you have to maintain.

Designer: Ultrahuman Healthcare Ltd.

Click Here to Buy Now: $399 $530 ($131 off). Hurry, only 1737/2005 left! Raised over $447,000.

A big part of that comes down to battery life. The Ring PRO offers up to 15 days on a single charge, roughly three to four times what most competing smart rings manage. That means fewer interruptions during long trips, consistent overnight tracking without data gaps, and no anxiety about a dead ring. The pocket-sized Mini Charger handles the rest, plugging in via Type-C and fitting easily into any bag. Utilizing the new UltraSnap Charging Technology, the Ring PRO magnetically clicks into place, removing the stress of trying to aim for perfect alignment. The charger also generates less heat while in use, thanks to an energy-efficient mechanism.

The ring sports a unibody titanium build, using the same fighter jet-grade material that has defined the Ultrahuman Ring from the beginning, keeping it lightweight yet durable enough for continuous wear. It’s water-resistant to 100m, so showers, swims, and more demanding water activities don’t require taking it off. It comes in sizes 5 to 14 and in four finishes: Bionic Gold, Aster Black, Space Silver, and Raw Titanium.

What sets Ring PRO apart, though, is a layer of real-time biointelligence called Jade AI. Rather than presenting raw data on a dashboard for you to decode, Jade reads across ring biometrics, blood biomarkers, and environmental data, then tells you what it all means for your health. It offers both quick answers for everyday use and a deeper research mode for tracking longer patterns and trends.

The core tracking covers the health signals most people care about: sleep stages, resting heart rate, HRV, body temperature, and daily movement. The Sleep Index and Dynamic Recovery don’t just score your rest or readiness; they aim to interpret those signals and adjust guidance as your body changes. The Stress Rhythm feature adds another layer by analyzing how your heart responds throughout the day against your circadian backdrop. Finally, Ultra Age can track how improving your lifestyle positively impacts your aging trajectory, giving you a competitive edge against time.

Beyond the basics, Ring PRO includes a library of more targeted health tools called PowerPlugs, precision micro-tools designed for highly personalized health insights. The Caffeine Window, for example, maps the best times for coffee against your recovery data and shifts your daily cutoff based on how well you slept. The Circadian Alignment tool tracks your body’s internal rhythm and flags when light, movement, or rest will have the most impact on energy and sleep quality.

The ring also adapts to different life stages rather than assuming everyone shares the same baseline. There are also dedicated modes for shift workers, new parents, and people with irregular schedules, where the scoring accounts for unconventional sleep timing and focuses on quality rather than rigid duration rules.

Women’s health is an extra strong focus for the Ultrahuman Ring PRO, and it goes beyond just covering cycle tracking, ovulation prediction, and logging symptoms. Cycle Flags, for example, offer insights that let women take a more proactive approach rather than just waiting for things to happen. With over 90% accuracy for ovulation confirmation, OvuSense Technology helps you understand your body better, whether you’re trying to conceive or navigating an irregular cycle.

Health tracking only works if you wear the device consistently enough for the data to build into something meaningful. Ring PRO’s combination of up to 250 days of on-ring storage, a dual-core processor with on-chip machine learning for speed, efficiency, and reliability, and a build designed for 24-hour wear makes a fairly pointed argument that the biggest obstacle between most people and better health data has always been friction, not features.

Click Here to Buy Now: $399 $530 ($131 off). Hurry, only 1737/2005 left! Raised over $447,000.

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Stoa Turns Chess Into Quiet Architecture for the Modern Home

Chess has always been a game of structure, strategy, and symbolism. The pieces carry centuries of visual language: the authority of the King, the movement of the Knight, the strength of the Rook, the quiet repetition of the Pawns. Many chess sets lean into that history through ornament, carving, and decorative detail. Stoa takes a different path. It looks at the same familiar game and asks what can be simplified without losing meaning.

Inspired by Scandinavian design principles, Stoa is shaped by clarity, balance, and calm visual expression. Its forms are clean, architectural, and restrained, giving the set a quiet presence that feels natural in modern interiors. The pieces do not feel overly decorative or nostalgic. They feel composed, almost like small spatial objects arranged across a board. This gives Stoa a visual language that is contemporary, but still deeply connected to the traditions of chess.

Designer: Fabian Haydt

The strength of the design lies in its balance between reduction and recognition. Each piece is simplified to its essential geometry, yet remains easy to identify during play. This is an important distinction. Minimal chess sets can sometimes become so abstract that they ask too much from the player. Stoa avoids that by treating simplicity as a careful design decision rather than a visual shortcut. The King, Queen, Bishop, Knight, Rook, and Pawn each have their own identity, but none of them rely on unnecessary detail to communicate their role.

That clarity matters because chess is a game of focus. A player should be able to read the board quickly, understand the position of each piece, and make decisions without visual distraction. Stoa supports that experience through uncluttered forms and restrained proportions. The pieces are easy to recognize, comfortable to hold, and stable on the board. Their visual calmness allows attention to stay on the game itself.

The Knight becomes one of the most interesting moments in the set. In traditional chess design, the Knight is often the most expressive piece, usually represented by a horse’s head. Reducing that form into a minimal object while keeping its character intact is a difficult challenge. Stoa handles it through proportion, silhouette, and a subtle sense of personality. It does not imitate the traditional Knight literally, but it preserves enough of its identity to make the piece immediately understandable.

Materiality adds another layer of refinement. Each piece is CNC-machined from solid recycled aluminum, giving the set a precise and durable foundation. After machining, the surfaces are polished and treated with fine glass bead-blasting to achieve a uniform matte texture. The pieces are then anodized for durability. This process gives Stoa a soft, premium finish that feels controlled rather than flashy.

The tactile experience is equally considered. Internal brass weights give the pieces a grounded feel, while leather pads on the bases provide stability and protect the board surface. These details make each move feel deliberate and satisfying. The weight, touch, and surface finish all contribute to a more immersive playing experience. Nothing feels accidental. Every material choice supports both function and atmosphere.

The proportions are compact and precise. The King stands at 68 mm, followed by the Queen at 62 mm, Bishop at 58 mm, Knight at 52 mm, Rook at 47 mm, and Pawn at 32 mm. The board measures 280 mm by 280 mm. This scale gives the set a refined presence without overwhelming the space around it. It can sit comfortably in a living room, study, or studio, carrying the elegance of a design object while remaining fully playable.

The development process focused on refining visual clarity, balance, and ergonomics. Multiple prototype stages helped test how the pieces felt in the hand and how quickly players could recognize them during faster gameplay. The challenge was not simply to make chess look minimal. It was to preserve the logic of the game while reducing each piece to a cleaner, more contemporary form. That required careful iteration, especially in maintaining distinction between pieces with similar proportions.

What remains is a chess set that feels calm, tactile, and quietly luxurious. Stoa brings a centuries-old game into a modern design language without disconnecting it from its roots. It respects tradition by understanding it, then translates that tradition through geometry, material precision, and visual discipline. The result is a set that feels made for contemporary life: thoughtful enough to admire, clear enough to play, and restrained enough to last.

The post Stoa Turns Chess Into Quiet Architecture for the Modern Home first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Grungy Metal Case turns your iPhone 17 Pro into an iPod Classic

The original iPod (even the iPhone) was designed to scratch. Contrary to the idea of Steve Jobs and Jony Ive chasing perfection, the idea behind having an iPod that wears and tears with use was that A. it would be less of a hurdle to get you to upgrade, but also B. it would make each iPod uniquely different.

The term designers and craftspeople use to describe this phenomenon is ‘Patina’, it’s when iron rusts a certain way, when bronze oxidizes in a unique style, or when leather wears down in a distinct manner that’s unique to each individual product and how it’s used. The back of the iPod would scratch based on whether you’d keep it on tables or in pockets, whether your pocket had keys, whether you accidentally scuffed it against your belt buckle or the railing of a flight of stairs. That patina was ‘by design’, and even though the new iPhones don’t have that feature, David Delahunty designed a case that lets you relive exactly that.

Designer: David Delahunty

Rather simply put the iPod Classic iPhone 17 Case, this distressed metal case was designed to fit around any iPhone 17 Pro or Pro Max, giving your phone the same grunge-ish vibe. It has the exact same curved body that the iPod Classic had, making the product feel almost identical to the original when held in your hand (bye bye sharp edges on the iPhone, you won’t be missed). The case sports the same artwork on the back too, with an iPod symbol and the Apple logo, along with even the certification text at the bottom… but what steals the show are the scratches.

Now it’s difficult to say if Delahunty designed each case to be unique, but that’s because these are just conceptual… for now. The designer, who goes by ‘delahuntagram’ on social media, churns out unique ideas of quirky products (like this MS paint makeup kit or this Apple Spinning Wheel Tennis Ball). Some products end up making it to reality, like the MacOS Folder SSD that is now available for sale. With enough interest, I don’t see how such a product couldn’t hit the mainstream. Delahunty even rendered an image of Drake (although I choose to see MJ) holding the phone in his hand while wearing those bejewelled gloves.

It isn’t the first time the iPhone’s been used as a canvas for Apple-of-the-past. Spigen routinely releases cases that transform the iPhone into Apple icons like the Lisa/Macintosh, or the iMac G3, or even the original iPhone 3G. The ‘scratched’ iPod is a fairly new design take, and something you could totally expect from the mind of Delahunty. I wonder if the case has a faux 3.5mm jack just for kicks…

The post This Grungy Metal Case turns your iPhone 17 Pro into an iPod Classic first appeared on Yanko Design.