Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

10 Iconic Frank Gehry Buildings That Celebrate The Late “Starchitect’s” Legacy

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Frank Gehry’s death will feel like a seismic event, even to people who never learned his name but knew “that crazy silver building” in their city. Born in Toronto in 1929 and raised in Los Angeles, he moved through the twentieth century like a restless experiment in motion, turning cardboard models into titanium-clad landmarks and treating cities as full-scale sketchbooks. His passing closes a chapter in which architecture stopped pretending to be purely rational infrastructure and allowed itself to be emotional, unstable, and sometimes gloriously impractical.

What lingers most is not only the spectacle of his work but the shift in attitude it made possible. Gehry treated architecture as a narrative medium, not a neutral backdrop; every warped surface and improbable curve suggested a story about risk, uncertainty, and delight. He pushed software, fabrication, and engineering to their limits long before “parametric design” became a buzzword, yet he remained suspicious of fashion and theory, insisting that buildings should be humane, tactile, and a bit mischievous. The structures he leaves behind do more than house art, music, or offices; they continue to provoke arguments, civic pride, and sometimes outrage, which may be the clearest sign that they are very much alive.

Gehry’s legacy is also institutional and generational. He helped reframe what a “starchitect” could be: not just a brand attached to luxury clients, but a public figure whose work could catalyze urban reinvention, as Bilbao discovered, or reshape how a city thinks about its cultural core, as Los Angeles learned. Dozens of younger architects cite him less for his specific forms than for his license to be disobedient, to treat the brief as a starting point rather than a boundary. In that sense, his death does not simply mark an ending; it underlines how thoroughly his once-radical sensibility has seeped into the mainstream of contemporary design.

As we return to his most iconic works, what becomes clear is how consistent his obsessions were across wildly different contexts. Light, movement, and the choreography of how a body moves through space preoccupied him as much as façades ever did. In his absence, the buildings remain as articulate as any obituary, each one a frozen fragment of his ongoing argument with gravity, convention, and taste. They stand not as monuments in the solemn sense, but as restless objects that still seem to be in the process of becoming something else.

Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain

A veritable masterpiece, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao redefined the very essence of museum architecture. Clad in shimmering titanium, limestone, and glass, its fluid form and undulating surfaces transformed the post-industrial city of Bilbao into a global cultural hub. Beyond its exterior, the museum offers a labyrinth of interconnected spaces, providing a dynamic environment for art display and contemplation, where visitors are constantly reoriented by shifting scales, vistas, and shafts of light.

The so-called “Bilbao Effect” grew out of this building, turning a risky cultural investment into a template for urban reinvention that countless cities tried to emulate, with varying success. The Guggenheim’s success lies not just in its photogenic skin, but in the way it engages the river, the bridges, and the city’s once-neglected waterfront, stitching art into the daily life of Bilbao. Inside, Gehry’s vast gallery volumes proved unexpectedly flexible, accommodating everything from monumental sculpture to delicate installations, and showing that radical form could coexist with curatorial practicality.

Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, USA

Situated in Los Angeles’ cultural corridor, the Walt Disney Concert Hall is an architectural symphony in stainless steel. Its sculptural, sail-like exterior rises from the street as if peeled up from the city grid, catching the famously sharp Southern California light and scattering it in soft, shifting reflections. The building’s complex geometry masks a remarkably clear organization, guiding audiences from the plaza and terraces into the heart of the hall through a sequence of compressed entries and soaring atriums.

Inside, the vineyard-style auditorium, wrapped in warm Douglas fir and oak, embodies Gehry’s close collaboration with acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The space is both intimate and monumental; the orchestra feels almost surrounded by the audience, and the sound is prized for its clarity and warmth. The organ, with its forest of asymmetrical wooden pipes, doubles as sculpture, echoing the exterior’s exuberance. Disney Hall did more than give Los Angeles a world-class concert venue; it anchored the city’s identity as a serious cultural capital and remains one of the rare buildings where musicians, critics, and everyday concertgoers are equally enthusiastic.

Dancing House, Prague, Czech Republic

In the heart of Prague, a city steeped in historic architectural grandeur, the Dancing House emerges as a contemporary icon. Its deconstructed silhouette, often likened to a dancing couple, stands in deliberate contrast to the neighboring Baroque and Gothic facades, signaling Prague’s evolving architectural narrative. The building’s glass “Fred” leans into the stone “Ginger,” creating a sense of motion that feels almost cinematic against the calm rhythm of the riverfront.

Beyond the playful metaphor, the Dancing House operates as a careful negotiation between old and new. Gehry and co-architect Vlado Milunić threaded the building into its tight urban site, respecting existing cornice lines while fracturing the expected symmetry and order. Offices occupy much of the interior, but the rooftop restaurant and terrace open the building to the public, offering panoramic views that reframe the city’s historic skyline. In a place where modern interventions are often contentious, the Dancing House has gradually shifted from scandal to beloved oddity, proving that contemporary architecture can coexist with, and even refresh, a deeply layered urban fabric.

Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France

Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton is a testament to the confluence of art, architecture, and landscape. Resembling a futuristic ship moored in the Bois de Boulogne, its glass “sails” seem to billow in the wind, catching reflections of trees, sky, and water. Set within the historic Jardin d’Acclimatation, the building plays a game of concealment and revelation; from some angles it appears almost transparent, from others it asserts itself as a crystalline object hovering above the park.

Inside, a series of white, box-like galleries are wrapped by the glass sails and linked through terraces, stairways, and bridges, creating a rich sequence of indoor-outdoor experiences. The museum’s program of contemporary art and performance takes advantage of these varied spaces, from intimate rooms to large, flexible volumes. At night, the Fondation becomes a lantern in the forest, a glowing presence that underscores Gehry’s fascination with light as a building material. It also represents a late-career synthesis for him: digital design and fabrication techniques are pushed to the extreme, yet the result feels surprisingly light, almost improvised, rather than technologically overdetermined.

Binoculars Building, Venice, Los Angeles, USA

Characterized by its monumental binocular facade, this office building exemplifies Gehry’s mischievous side. The structure is a hybrid of architecture and sculpture, with the colossal binoculars, originally a work by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, serving as the principal entrance. Cars and pedestrians pass through the lenses, turning a familiar object into an inhabitable threshold and gently mocking the solemnity usually associated with corporate architecture.

The rest of the building, composed of irregular volumes clad in rough stucco and brick, plays foil to the central object, creating a streetscape that feels more like an assemblage of found pieces than a single, unified block. Over the years, the building has housed creative offices, including tech tenants, and has become a kind of mascot for the neighborhood’s informal, experimental energy. It demonstrates Gehry’s comfort with pop culture and humor, and his willingness to let another artist’s work literally occupy center stage, reinforcing his belief that architecture can be a generous collaborator rather than a jealous frame.

Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, Las Vegas, USA

In a city known for its flamboyant spectacles, the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health stands out with its cascading stainless steel forms that seem to melt and twist in the desert sun. The building is split into two distinct parts: a relatively rectilinear clinical wing that houses examination and treatment rooms, and a wildly contorted event hall whose warped grid and skewed windows evoke the tangled pathways of the brain. This juxtaposition turns the complex into a physical metaphor for cognitive disorder and the search for clarity within it.

Beyond its sculptural bravado, the center represents an attempt to bring architectural attention and philanthropic energy to the often invisible struggles of neurological disease and dementia. The event space helps fund the medical and research programs, hosting gatherings that place patients’ stories at the center of civic life. For Gehry, who has spoken publicly about friends and family affected by these conditions, the project had a personal resonance, and it shows in the building’s emotional charge. It is one of the clearest examples of his belief that dramatic form can serve not just commerce or culture, but also care and advocacy.

Neuer Zollhof, Düsseldorf, Germany

Overlooking Düsseldorf’s MedienHafen, the Neuer Zollhof complex showcases Gehry’s skill at composing buildings as a kind of urban sculpture. The trio of towers, each with its own material identity in white plaster, red brick, and shimmering stainless steel, appears to lean and sway, as if the harbor winds had pushed them out of alignment. Their undulating facades break up reflections of sky and water, adding a kinetic quality to what might otherwise be a static office district.

At the ground level, the buildings carve out irregular courtyards and passages that encourage wandering rather than straight-line commuting. This porousness allows the waterfront to feel more public, less like a sealed-off corporate enclave. Over time, Neuer Zollhof has become a visual shorthand for Düsseldorf’s transformation from industrial port to media and design hub, appearing in tourism imagery and local branding. The ensemble illustrates how Gehry could work at the scale of a neighborhood, not just a single object, using repetition and variation to give a district a distinct identity without lapsing into monotony.

Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, USA

The Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota is a compact manifesto of Gehry’s interest in reflective surfaces and fractured forms. From the campus side, the building presents a relatively calm brick facade that aligns with neighboring structures, but facing the Mississippi River it explodes into a cascade of stainless steel planes. These facets catch the Midwestern light in constantly changing patterns, so the museum’s appearance shifts dramatically between bright winter mornings and long summer evenings.

Inside, the galleries are more restrained than the exterior might suggest, with white walls and straightforward geometries that accommodate a diverse collection, including American modernism and Native American art. The contrast between the calm interior and the exuberant shell underscores Gehry’s understanding that museums must serve art first, even when they are iconic objects in their own right. For the university and the city, the Weisman has become a landmark visible from bridges and river paths, a reminder that serious academic institutions can also embrace a bit of visual risk.

Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany

Situated on the Vitra Campus, the Vitra Design Museum is one of Gehry’s earliest European works and a key piece in his evolution toward the more fluid forms of later years. The small building is composed of intersecting white plastered volumes, pitched roofs, and cylindrical elements, all twisted and stacked in a way that feels both familiar and disorienting. It reads like a collage of fragments from traditional architecture, reassembled into a dynamic, almost cubist object.

The museum’s interiors are intimate and idiosyncratic, with sloping ceilings and unexpected vistas that suit exhibitions on furniture, industrial design, and everyday objects. As part of a campus that later attracted buildings by Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando, and others, Gehry’s museum helped establish Vitra’s reputation as a patron of experimental architecture. The project also marked one of the first major uses of his now-signature white sculptural volumes in Europe, setting the stage for the more complex geometries of Bilbao and beyond while reminding us that his work has always been as much about composition and light as about metallic skins.

8 Spruce Street (Beekman Tower), New York, USA

Rising above Lower Manhattan’s skyline, 8 Spruce Street, often branded as New York by Gehry, demonstrates his ability to bring a sense of movement to the rigid logic of the skyscraper. Its rippling stainless steel facade wraps a conventional concrete frame, creating the illusion of draped fabric caught in a vertical breeze. As daylight moves across the tower, the folds deepen and flatten, giving the building a constantly shifting presence against the more static grid of neighboring high-rises.

Inside, the residential tower combines rental apartments with amenities that were, at the time of its completion, notably generous for downtown living, including schools and community facilities at the base. The project signaled a shift in Lower Manhattan from a primarily financial district to a more mixed, residential neighborhood, and it showed that expressive architecture did not have to be reserved for cultural institutions or luxury condos. By applying his vocabulary to everyday housing, Gehry suggested that the pleasures of complex form and careful detailing could, at least occasionally, reach beyond elite enclaves and into the fabric of ordinary urban life.

The post 10 Iconic Frank Gehry Buildings That Celebrate The Late “Starchitect’s” Legacy first appeared on Yanko Design.

LONGER’s $1,499 Dual-head UV Printer Prints iPhone Cases, Braille, and Custom Merch in 6x Speed

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Last year, a consumer-focused UV printer made a remarkable splash on Kickstarter, marking the first time consumer UV printing made it to the big leagues. Now, LONGER ePrint enters the market, bringing unique innovation, a user-friendly experience, and highly competitive pricing to DIY enthusiasts, startups, and designers alike. Built for creative expression and customizable solutions. The campaign has already achieved an impressive $3.6 million in sales within its first week.

LONGER brings a decade of experience (and four successful crowdfunding campaigns) making 3D printers and laser engravers to this project, plus patents and research credentials from its MIT and Georgia Tech founding team. The ePrint’s headline feature is its dual-printhead design with 12 ink channels, which the company says delivers print speeds up to six times faster than single-head printers when laying down textured white ink layers. Add automated cleaning systems, white ink circulation to prevent clogging, and compatibility with third-party inks, and LONGER has assembled a feature set aimed squarely at cost-conscious small businesses.

Designer: Longer ePrint

Click Here to Buy Now: $1499 $2199 ($700 off). Hurry, only 85/250 left! Raised over $3.7 million.

LONGER runs 12 ink channels across two printheads in the full ePrint model: CMYK color plus six white channels and two varnish channels. Building up textured prints to the maximum 60mm height means laying down multiple passes of white ink. Six white channels working simultaneously stack ink six times faster than a single channel could manage. For flat printing without the texture work, the dual-head configuration cuts print time by 50 to 70 percent. At 1440 DPI resolution, print quality stays consistent while speeds improve.

Running a small custom merch operation means speed directly translates to how many orders you can fulfill in a day. Print a full-color design on a phone case and you’re looking at roughly 2 to 3 minutes at high quality settings, faster if you drop to balanced or draft modes. A dozen custom phone cases in under half an hour. Coasters, small signs, and similar flat items clock in at similar speeds. Want to add that 3D textured effect with raised logos or embossed details? That takes longer since you’re building up layers of white ink, but the dual printheads working together mean you’re still finishing pieces in reasonable timeframes rather than waiting hours per item. The 310mm by 420mm print bed accommodates most personal accessories and small merchandise. You’re not printing posters, but phone cases, drinkware graphics, small wooden signs, custom keycaps, personalized gifts, all the items that make up craft fair tables and Etsy shops fit comfortably.

That 60mm embossing capability opens up applications beyond flat graphics. You can produce tactile braille signage with actual raised dots instead of stickers. Relief sculptures and dimensional art pieces become feasible without molding or casting. Product prototypes gain realistic texture that photographs can’t convey. Custom keycaps for mechanical keyboards, raised logos on promotional items, textured business cards that stand out in a stack. Small batch production of items that would normally require expensive tooling or outsourcing to specialty shops. Running a custom merchandise side business or handling client work for local businesses becomes viable when you’re not paying per-piece service bureau rates or minimum order quantities.

White ink creates problems for every UV printer manufacturer. Leave it sitting idle and it separates, leading to inconsistent prints and clogged nozzles that can brick expensive printheads. LONGER built a continuous circulation system that keeps white ink flowing even when you’re not printing. Automated cleaning cycles purge the printheads periodically to prevent clogs before they start. Most desktop UV printers demand manual maintenance rituals before each job. LONGER designed this to stay ready rather than requiring constant babysitting.

The best part is that this printer isn’t unscrupulously bound to specific ink cartridges – the system is designed to be open, and LONGER accepts third-party ink cartridges, including low-migration ink varieties for printing on plates and packaging. You get twelve 200ml cartridges in the dual-head model, totaling 2.4 liters of capacity. Proprietary cartridge systems lock you into whatever the manufacturer charges. Over months of production, open ink compatibility saves real money.

Flatbed mode handles your standard work on flat materials up to 310mm by 420mm. Wood plaques, acrylic sheets, metal panels, glass coasters, leather patches. The 10mm high-gap printing capability means the printhead stays elevated above the material, so you can print on textured wood, embossed surfaces, or slightly warped materials without the head scraping or smudging wet ink. Phone cases with camera bumps, rough stone tiles, wrinkled leather, all printable without fighting the machine.

Rotary printing opens up cylindrical objects. Water bottles, wine bottles, tumblers, pens, flashlights, anything roughly cylindrical that fits the attachment. The printer rotates the object while printing, wrapping your design around the curve. Transfer film mode takes a different approach by printing onto a special film substrate first. Print your design with the UV printer, then use the included laminator to apply heat and pressure, transferring the design onto fabric. You’re making custom heat-transfer stickers for t-shirts, jackets, bags, hats. Not direct-to-garment printing, but useful when DTG doesn’t work well or when you want that raised, glossy finish that UV ink provides. The laminator handles the heat-press work, so you’re not buying separate equipment.

Roll-to-roll attachment extends the workflow for producing multiple transfers in sequence. Instead of printing individual pieces, you load a roll of transfer film, print continuously, and wind up the finished prints on the output roll. Makes sense if you’re producing batches of vinyl stickers or multiple heat-transfer designs for a clothing run. The conveyor belt attachment serves a similar batching purpose but for rigid objects. Load up phone cases, coasters, or other small items, and the conveyor moves them through the print area automatically. No manual repositioning between pieces. Between these four modes and the accessories that enable them, LONGER built a system that adapts to different production workflows rather than locking you into one application.

Dual lasers and a 16MP camera handle object detection and positioning automatically. In batch mode, the system scans multiple objects, identifies positions, and fills patterns without manual placement for each piece. Software includes AI-powered background removal and pattern generation too.

UV printing generates fumes that need proper ventilation regardless of what the manufacturer says about filtration. LONGER includes air purification and claims operation stays under 60dB, quieter than conversation. At 650mm by 445mm by 330mm and 30kg for the dual-head version, it genuinely fits on a desk rather than demanding dedicated floor space like industrial models. You still want good airflow in your workspace, but the footprint works for small studios or home offices with proper setup.

Early bird pricing breaks down to $1,499 for the single-head ePrint SE with six ink channels, $1,899 for the dual-head ePrint with 12 channels, and $2,949 for the all-in-one combo bundling rotary, laminator, conveyor, and roll-to-roll attachments. US and EU backers get free shipping.

Click Here to Buy Now: $1499 $2199 ($700 off). Hurry, only 85/250 left! Raised over $3.7 million.

The post LONGER’s $1,499 Dual-head UV Printer Prints iPhone Cases, Braille, and Custom Merch in 6x Speed first appeared on Yanko Design.

DJI Meets Polestar in This Sleek White FPV Drone Concept That Rejects the Racing Aesthetic

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Polestar’s cool Nordic minimalism is not the first thing you expect to see in an FPV rig, yet this concept leans into that contrast and makes it feel inevitable. The drone lifts DJI’s “stacked” architecture of camera, flight controller, cooling, and battery, then wraps it in a crisp, automotive shell that would look just as natural parked beside an electric coupe as it would screaming through a canyon. Instead of the usual exposed carbon and repair-bench aesthetic, the body reads like a single sculpted volume, with the arms flowing out of a central spine and a long, glassy tech strip revealing the hardware beneath. Subtle light signatures, a clean white finish, and a battery module that wears the Polestar wordmark turn what is usually a niche racing tool into something that feels like a premium consumer product, without sanding off its performance edge.

The design’s intelligence lies in how it translates DJI’s engineering logic into a clean visual language. The concept of “structural stacking” is central here, treating each primary component as a self-contained module arranged in a neat, vertical order. The camera and gimbal sit in a dedicated nose pod, followed by the flight control unit and heat dissipation systems under the long, dark canopy, with the battery locking in as a solid block at the rear. This layered approach brings an architectural order to the drone’s anatomy, making the technology feel organized and accessible. It moves away from the traditional FPV layout, where components are often fastened to an open frame, and instead presents a unified, product-like object that feels intentional from every angle.

Designer: Ocean

The drone’s body is finished in a matte, almost ceramic white, with surfaces that are both soft and incredibly precise, a hallmark of the EV brand’s surfacing strategy. The long, dark insert on top is more than just a cover; it’s a “tech window” that frames the internal hardware as a point of interest, much like Polestar does with its glass roofs and integrated sensor bars. Even the lighting is handled with automotive discipline. The thin purple accents feel like signature light blades, providing a controlled glow that suggests advanced technology rather than the often chaotic RGB strips found on custom FPV builds. The result is a machine that feels both high-tech and incredibly calm.

Still, this polished exterior does not compromise the drone’s aggressive spirit. The wide, planted stance and large, efficient-looking propellers signal that it is built for serious performance. A look at the underside reveals a dense cluster of sensors, cooling vents, and structural ribbing, confirming that this is a tool for demanding pilots, not a toy. The designer skillfully balances these hard-core elements with a consumer-friendly sensibility. The battery, for instance, is a perfect example. Branded with the Polestar logo and featuring clear, intuitive LED charge indicators, it feels like a piece of premium electronics, making a critical component feel safe and simple to handle for users who may not be seasoned hobbyists.

Ultimately, this concept imagines an FPV experience for the tech enthusiast who appreciates sophisticated design as much as raw performance. It is a drone for the person who owns a Polestar, not just because it is electric, but because of its commitment to a clean, forward-looking aesthetic. By merging the robust, modular architecture of a DJI product with the refined, human-centric design of a modern EV, this concept suggests that the future of high-performance drones might be less about exposed wires and carbon fiber, and more about the seamless integration of power and polish.

The post DJI Meets Polestar in This Sleek White FPV Drone Concept That Rejects the Racing Aesthetic first appeared on Yanko Design.

These Ceramic Cups Were Designed And Manufactured Entirely By An Algorithm

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Sure, we could sit and fearmonger about how AI will one day replace designers, but here’s an alternative reality – what if AI didn’t replace us, it just created a parallel reality? Like you’ve got Japanese ceramics, Italian ceramics, and Turkish ceramics, what if you could have AI ceramics? Not a replacement, not a substitute, just another channel. That’s what BKID envisioned with ‘Texture Ware’, a series of cups designed entirely by AI and manufactured using 3D printing. Minimal human intervention, and minimal human cultural input.

The AI feeds itself a vast repository of data and uses its own database to make textural products that humans then use. BKID’s results look nothing like anything we’ve seen before, each cup of the Texture Ware series looks almost alien, an exaggeration of textures found in nature taken to an extreme. You wouldn’t find such cups in a handicrafts bazaar or your local IKEA. They’re so different that they exist as a separate entity within the industry, not a replacement of the industry itself.

Designer: BKID co

The workflow uses different AI services to go from prompt to cup. The only real input is a text prompt from a human specifying what sort of texture they want. The AI generates the texture image using ChatGPT’s Dall-E, creates  a cup out of it in Midjourney, and then translates the 2D image of a cup to 3D using Vizcom. The 3D file then gets 3D printed, eliminating pretty much any actual human intervention as the machine models and manufactures the design from start to end.

“What would normally require a considerable amount of time if crafted entirely by hand was instead realized through two to three generative tools and a process of repeated trial and error,” says BKID. “The exaggerated expressions and omitted forms that emerge in each stage invite the audience to experience the subtle differences in sensibility between traditional handcraft and craft shaped by generative software.”

Users can make cups inspired by brutalist textures of concrete, fuzzy textures of moss, rustic textures of wood-bark, wrinkled textures of crumpled paper, raw textures of coal, columnar textures of basalt rock, porous-like textures of coral, or even alien-like textures of fungi. Each cup looks unique and the AI never repeats itself, which means even cups within the same texture category could be wildly different.

The result truly feels alien, because the AI approaches design using an entirely different set of parameters. Their imperfections become design details, their lack of ergonomics or awareness become a unique design DNA. The result isn’t like any cup you’ve ever seen before, and that’s the point – it’s created by an AI that hasn’t ‘seen’ cups, hasn’t used cups, and doesn’t test its output. That being said, the cups are still usable because of the parameters set by the human. The cups don’t have holes, and contain enough volume to hold liquid efficiently. They’re perfect for espresso, saké, or green tea, something that’s savored in tiny quantities in vessels that feel less utilitarian and more ritualistic.

What BKID’s experiment proves is that AI (at least in this case) won’t replace designers, it’ll exist independent of them. Can an AI make a cup exactly like a regular designer would? Absolutely… but there’s a better case to be made to have AI make things beyond human creativity and culture. These cups contort nature and textures into something that feel extremely new, in a way that allows AI-made cups and human-made cups to coexist peacefully.

The post These Ceramic Cups Were Designed And Manufactured Entirely By An Algorithm first appeared on Yanko Design.

This LEGO Christmas Snow Globe Actually Spins and it’s Perfect Stocking Stuffer Material

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As Mariah Carey says religiously every single December – “It’s tiiiime!” As we kick off the last month of the year and the holiday season, this LEGO build adds exactly the right spice to everyone’s lives. Why buy a generic snow globe from Hallmark when you could make your own, asks The Brick Artist – the designer behind the Christmas Snow Globe currently gathering momentum on the LEGO Ideas website.

We’ve covered LEGO snow globes before on this website, but none of them designed to be as dynamic as this MOC (My Own Creation). The Brick Artist’s build actually features a rotating element, allowing the globe to spin on its own axis like a tiny fidget toy. Inside, the globe features a decked out Christmas tree complete with baubles, stars, and a shimmering snowflake tree topper. Underneath the tree are the usual suspects, gifts like a wooden train, the nutcracker, a toy rocket, and a remote-controlled airplane.

Designer: The Brick Artist

The build looks fairly simple, with a base decorated with snowflakes and wreaths, capped off with a rotating platform which houses the Christmas tree encased in the clear orb. The Brick Artist hasn’t detailed the part-count, but it’s probably in the 200-400 brick-ballpark, making it easy to assemble and perfect for kids, adults, or even Santa and his elves.

The way the tree rotates is using a rotary crank on the back that probably activates a pair of bevel gears that cause the upper half to spin on a central axis. There’s no music element here, although that would probably seal the deal as a pretty fun Christmas toy. However, the joy of this MOC isn’t in the experience as much as the journey of building your own snow globe from scratch.

The drill with this MOC is like every other one we’ve written about. It’s a fan-made creation that currently exists only on LEGO’s Ideas website – an online forum where people build and share their own LEGO creations and have the broader community vote for them. The only way this build becomes an official LEGO box set is if it crosses the 10,000 vote mark, and then gets approved by LEGO’s internal team after a review period. If you want to see that happen, head down to the LEGO Ideas website and cast your vote for this brickset!

The post This LEGO Christmas Snow Globe Actually Spins and it’s Perfect Stocking Stuffer Material first appeared on Yanko Design.

Pantone’s 2026 Color of the Year Finally Admits We’re All Exhausted

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Pantone has officially called it: the prevailing mood for 2026 is exhaustion. This marks a sharp departure from recent years, when the annual announcement felt like a conversation happening in a different room. The world was navigating a pandemic hangover and digital burnout, while Pantone was prescribing electric purples for creativity and defiant magentas for bravery. Each choice, while commercially friendly, felt like a wellness influencer telling a tired person to simply manifest more energy.

This year, however, their choice of Cloud Dancer, a soft, billowy white, functions less like a statement and more like a surrender. It is the color of a blank page, an empty inbox, a quiet sky, a white flag, if you will. By choosing a hue defined by its peaceful lack of saturation, Pantone is finally acknowledging the dominant cultural mood – burnout. They are admitting that the most aspirational feeling right now is not vigor or joy, but rest.

Designer: Pantone

To understand why this feels so significant, you have to look at the recent track record. The disconnect between Pantone’s narrative and the world’s reality has been the core of the critique, which I made back in 2022, calling Pantone’s Very Peri an exercise in blind futility. The argument was that Pantone was no longer reading culture but trying to write it, pushing a top-down color prophecy that served its own marketing ecosystem more than it reflected any genuine grassroots sentiment. This critique felt especially potent with the last two selections, Peach Fuzz and Mocha Mousse.

Peach Fuzz, the choice for 2024, was sold with a story of tenderness, community, and tactile comfort. It was a lovely, gentle shade, but it landed in a year defined by rising inflation, geopolitical instability, and a pervasive anxiety about the acceleration of artificial intelligence. The narrative felt like a beautifully packaged lie of omission. Then came Mocha Mousse for 2025, a comforting brown meant to evoke groundedness and stability. It was a safe, aesthetically pleasing choice that aligned perfectly with coffee-shop interior trends, but it felt more like an algorithmic pick from a Pinterest board labeled “cozy” than a meaningful cultural statement. It was a color for a lifestyle, not for a life.

Which brings us to Cloud Dancer. On the surface, choosing white seems like the ultimate cop-out. It is the absence, the default, the non-choice. But Pantone’s justification is, for the first time in a long while, deeply resonant. Leatrice Eiseman, the executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, describes it as a “conscious statement of simplification” meant to provide “release from the distraction of external influences.” Laurie Pressman, the vice president, is even more direct, stating, “We’re looking for respite, looking for relief… we just want to step back.”

This is not the language of aspirational marketing; it is the language of burnout. Pantone is explicitly naming the problem: overstimulation, digital noise, and the overwhelming “cacophony that surrounds us.” Cloud Dancer is positioned as the visual antidote, a quiet space in a world that refuses to shut up. It is a breath of fresh air, a lofty vantage point above the chaos. By framing the color as a tool for focus and a symbol of a much-needed pause, Pantone has shifted from prescribing an emotion to validating one. It feels less like they are telling us how to feel and more like they are saying, “We hear you. You’re tired.”

Of course, we should not mistake this newfound self-awareness for a complete abandonment of the marketing machine. The Color of the Year is, and always will be, a commercial enterprise. But the choice of Cloud Dancer is a savvier, more sophisticated move. Choosing white cleverly sidesteps the pressure to project forced optimism. It aligns perfectly with existing design trends like soft minimalism and quiet luxury, making it an easy sell to brands. Most importantly, it allows Pantone to craft a story about retreat and renewal, a narrative that feels both authentic and highly marketable in a wellness-obsessed culture.

So, is the ‘marketing fluff’ gone? Not entirely. But it has been supplemented with something much more compelling. Instead of a tone-deaf declaration, we have a confession that feels a little more aware of a global sentiment. Cloud Dancer works because it is an admission of defeat. It is a white flag, a symbol of surrender to the relentless pace of modern life. In a world saturated with color, demanding our attention at every turn, the most radical and desired hue might just be the one that asks for nothing. Pantone did not just pick a color for 2026; it picked a feeling, and for the first time in a long time, it feels like our own.

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Starbucks China Is Selling a $28 Camera With Dual Sensors and Y2K Filters

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Starbucks wants you to photograph your coffee so badly that they’ve started selling you the camera to do it with. The Seattle coffee chain has ventured into digital imaging with a retro-styled camera that’s generating buzz for being surprisingly functional rather than just another piece of logo-plastered merchandise.

Released in China for the 2025 holiday season, the Starbucks Retro Digital Camera comes with dual sensors, vintage filters, and a design aesthetic borrowed from classic rangefinder cameras. At 198 yuan (roughly $28), it undercuts almost every digital camera on the market while offering features like proper selfie framing through its rear sensor and Y2K photo overlays. The metal-and-leather construction in burgundy-gold or green-silver colorways suggests Starbucks contracted with an established camera manufacturer rather than creating novelty electronics from scratch.

Designer: Starbucks

Look, Starbucks absolutely did not design this camera from the ground up. That $28 price point screams white-label collaboration with one of China’s numerous budget camera OEMs, and honestly, why wouldn’t they? The country has an entire ecosystem of manufacturers churning out retro-inspired digital cameras for the nostalgia market. You’d be an idiot to build camera R&D infrastructure when you’re a coffee company. Slap your logo on proven hardware, customize the leather colors, engrave “EVERY MOMENT MATTERS” around the lens ring, and call it a day. Starbucks already did this dance with LOMO on an instant camera in 2024, so they know the playbook. Partner with people who actually understand imaging sensors and leave the coffee roasting to yourself.

What actually matters here is that dual-sensor setup, because it solves a problem that every budget camera has ignored for decades. Taking selfies with a traditional camera means holding it at arm’s length, pressing the shutter, and praying you’re somewhere in the frame. Maybe your face is cut off. Maybe you captured mostly ceiling. Who knows? Starbucks stuck a second sensor where the viewfinder would normally sit, turning decorative nonsense into a functional front-facing camera. You frame yourself on the rear LCD exactly like using a smartphone, which means the target audience (people who want filtered photos for Instagram) can actually use this thing without wanting to throw it against a wall. Those nine Y2K photo frame overlays and retro filters are pure nostalgia bait, but we’re drowning in millennium aesthetics right now anyway. Fashion’s doing it, UI design’s doing it, why shouldn’t cameras?

Resale prices jumped to $72 almost immediately, which tells you everything about actual demand. Triple the original price means people want these as functional devices, not just collectors hoarding Starbucks merch. The lychee leather texture and metal construction feel surprisingly premium when you hold one. Those decorative dials on top are completely useless, sure, but they nail the vintage rangefinder look well enough that you’d need to inspect closely to realize this costs less than a week of lattes. At some point, perceived quality matters as much as actual specs, especially when you’re targeting casual photographers who care more about vibes than aperture settings.

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This Cardboard Guitar Is 70% Air… But It Still Plays Like A Fender

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Ten years ago, Fender and Signal put out a cardboard Stratocaster that made the rounds online and promptly disappeared into the “cool but impractical” category of guitar experiments. Burls Art saw it and had a different reaction: he wanted to build his own. Not as a replica, but as a legitimate exploration of what corrugated cardboard could do as a guitar-building material. The result is a 4.42-pound fully functional electric guitar that sounds surprisingly good and raises some interesting questions about material choices in instrument design.

The concept isn’t about gimmickry or standard internet clout-chasing, it’s about pushing cardboard to its structural limits while keeping the guitar genuinely playable. Burls Art started with recycled corrugated cardboard sheets, laminating them with resin into blanks thick enough to shape into a body and neck. The key was saturating each piece thoroughly while letting excess resin drain through runners, leaving the corrugated channels mostly hollow. This gave him blanks that were roughly 70% air but rigid enough to route and carve like traditional tonewoods.

Designer: Burls Arts

The body came together relatively smoothly. He used a router sled instead of risking the planer, carving in standard contours – a belly carve on the back, an arm bevel on top – that wouldn’t look out of place on any conventional Strat-style build. The visual effect is unexpectedly compelling: from up close, the corrugation creates a textured, almost screen-like appearance, but step back and align your sight line just right, and the guitar becomes nearly transparent, with just the outline visible through thousands of tiny cardboard channels.

The neck presented a more complex engineering challenge. String tension on a guitar neck isn’t trivial, we’re talking about roughly 100-150 pounds of force depending on string gauge and tuning. Cardboard, even laminated cardboard, doesn’t immediately inspire confidence in this application. Burls Art’s first approach drew inspiration from an unexpected source: the Wiggle Side Chair he’d seen at the London Design Museum, which alternates the grain orientation of its cardboard layers for added strength. He tested two lamination methods – one with consistent orientation, another alternating… and the results were dramatic. The alternated pattern withstood 125 pounds of force before breaking, compared to just 37 pounds for the standard orientation.

The first neck, despite being theoretically strong enough, had a fatal flaw: the edges kept peeling and creating rough, jagged surfaces that would be uncomfortable to play. This is where real-world application diverges from lab testing, a neck that can withstand string tension in theory still needs to feel right in your hands. Rather than continuing to troubleshoot the alternating pattern, he pivoted to a fully resin-saturated approach, essentially creating a cardboard-epoxy composite. It’s heavier, sure, but the cardboard fibers act like fiberglass reinforcement, preventing the cracking issues you’d see in a pure resin neck while giving him a surface that could be carved smooth and fretted without delamination issues.

Weight became the next puzzle. That resin-saturated neck was too heavy for the ultra-light body, creating the dreaded neck dive – where the headstock droops toward the floor when you’re wearing the guitar on a strap. He carved aggressively, removing as much material as possible without compromising structural integrity, using the balance point at the neck plate as his target. The final setup required dropping down to Super Slinky strings to reduce the tension demands on the truss rod, which makes sense when you’re working at the edge of a material’s capabilities.

Hardware mounting in corrugated cardboard requires creative problem-solving. You can’t just screw into hollow channels and expect it to hold. For the bridge, he fabricated a resin-saturated cardboard backplate that gets inset into the body, creating a clamping system with the cardboard sandwiched between the bridge and plate. The electronics cavity cover uses magnets paired with screw heads hot-glued into the corrugation – a cleaner solution than trying to thread screws into this material.

The finished instrument plays better than you’d expect. Action is solid, intonation holds, and the sound quality is legitimately good with its pair of lipstick single-coils. There’s an interesting side effect from the flexible body: it’s exceptionally responsive to vibrato from arm pressure. Apply a bit of force with your forearm and you get pronounced pitch modulation, far more than you’d get from a traditional solid-body design. Whether that’s a feature or a bug depends on your playing style, but it’s the kind of unexpected behavior that makes alternative materials interesting.

The tactile experience is admittedly different from your standard Stratocaster. The surface has a sticky quality against fabric, and the edges are intentionally rough – he could have added wood binding to smooth them out but chose to keep it authentically cardboard. At 4.42 pounds, it’s 3-4 pounds lighter than a typical electric guitar, which puts it closer to laptop weight than instrument weight. That’s legitimately remarkable when you consider it’s holding tune under full string tension.

This isn’t going to replace your main gigging guitar, and Burls Art isn’t suggesting it should. But it’s a genuine exploration of material science applied to lutherie (the craft of making stringed instruments), the kind of project that answers questions nobody was asking but everyone’s curious about once they see the results. The original Fender collaboration was proof of concept. This is proof that with enough ingenuity and willingness to iterate past initial failures, cardboard can be a legitimate choice for guitar-building… after all IKEA’s made tables out of the same material too.

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When Data Says No And Your Gut Says Go: What Designers Can Learn From Ti Chang

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Design Mindset, Yanko Design’s weekly podcast powered by KeyShot, is quickly becoming a space where designers unpack how ideas actually move from gut feeling to shipped product. Episode 13 zeroes in on something every creative feels but rarely names clearly: that inner voice that pulls you toward a risky idea long before the data looks friendly. Host Radhika Singh calls it “that mysterious inner voice that guides our best work,” the sensation when “data says one thing but something deeper says let’s try something else instead.” A new episode drops every week, and this one sits right at the intersection of intuition, taboo, and cultural change.

This time, Radhika speaks with industrial designer and entrepreneur Ti Chang, Co Founder and Chief Design Officer at CRAVE, the San Francisco company behind design led vibrators and “pleasure jewelry” for women. Ti has spent her career trusting her creative compass in one of the most stigmatized consumer categories. From Duet, an early crowdfunded USB rechargeable vibrator, to necklaces that double as vibrators, she keeps making moves that look commercially reckless on paper and then quietly create new product categories. The episode becomes a compact playbook for using intuition without abandoning rigor.

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Trusting your inner compass when no one else sees it

Ti does not treat intuition as a vague vibe. It is the core of how she decides what to make. “Intuition is something that have guided me throughout my process,” she says. Her first filter is simple: if a concept does not resonate deeply with her, it is unlikely to resonate with others. “If you follow your intuition to create something that resonates with you, there’s a much higher chance that you’ll resonate with somebody else.” She borrows that framing from Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act, but applies it in a very concrete way to industrial design.

Her career choices follow a three part test. “I’ve been able to find something that serves people and that I’m interested in and I have the skill set to do, and the marriage of these three is what has allowed me to I think have a quite a fulfilling life so far.” Intuition, for her, is not anti research. It is what tells you which questions to ask, which users to serve, and which ideas deserve the grind of engineering and validation. When Radhika asks what trusting that compass feels like, Ti is blunt: “It feels scary. It feels scary and it feels isolating because you’re the only person who sees it and nobody else quite understands it. And so for a long time, you’re going to just be in a scary kind of alone, a lonely spot.” Being early, she suggests, comes with that loneliness baked in.

Nudging culture from the middle, not the extremes

Designing for intimate wellness means walking a tightrope between too safe and too provocative. Ti describes her job as knowing her “playground.” On one edge are clinical, anonymous forms that keep taboos intact. On the other are objects so polarizing that they scare off the very people she wants to reach. Her goal is to live in the middle, where aesthetics are aspirational enough to move culture, but digestible enough that people actually buy and use them.

“You want to be able to nudge people along, bring them along with an aesthetic that they find acceptable and that they can digest, while all the while pushing, you know, aspirational and also creating room for a little more edginess, you know, without completely polarizing them.” She is clear about the commercial reality too. “If I created something that was just so polarizing, I’m sorry, like I would probably sell three a year, you know?” That is not just bad business, it is misaligned with her mission. “I know my playground. I know what will work for the agenda that I am trying to help people have a more open conversation about pleasure.” That agenda shapes choices around materials, silhouettes, and how proudly a product can sit on a bedside table without broadcasting its function.

Duet and pleasure jewelry, when “crazy” ideas become categories

CRAVE’s Duet is a neat case study in how Ti blends intuition with hard engineering. Long before USB everything became standard, she and her team asked why intimate products still relied on disposable batteries and clumsy chargers. The answer became a slim metal vibrator that plugged directly into a USB port, with the motor and electronics separated for safety and durability. This was 2008, pre Kickstarter playbook. Ti self funded prototypes, sourced metal work in China, and took early units to an adult products trade show. Instead of over indexing on focus groups, she watched buyer behavior. Immediate purchase orders were her market validation that the gut call was reading the culture correctly.

If Duet was bold, pleasure jewelry was the move that really made people think she had lost it. In the rapid fire round, when Radhika asks for “one decision you made on pure intuition that everyone thought was crazy,” Ti answers instantly: “Pleasure jewelry.” Turning necklaces and bracelets into fully functional vibrators that can be worn in public contradicted every convention in the category. Investors struggled to imagine why anyone would want their vibrator around their neck. Only once the pieces existed, and early adopters responded emotionally, did the idea begin to make sense to the market. Ti is careful not to claim that empowerment lives in the object. She rejects the notion that women must wear pleasure jewelry to feel powerful, framing empowerment as internal, with products as optional tools that some people find resonant and others simply do not.

Selling intuition to data driven stakeholders

A big chunk of value in this episode lies in how Ti translates a private hunch into something investors, engineers, and retailers can actually work with. Stakeholders do not fund “I have a feeling.” They fund roadmaps and artifacts. Visualization tools sit at the center of that bridge. KeyShot, the episode’s sponsor, is part of her daily workflow, letting her explore materials, textures, and finishes in real time. Those renders are not just for pitch decks. They help her test her own instinctive reaction to an object’s presence. In intimate categories, she often finds those visceral responses more useful than sanitized focus group quotes.

At the same time, she respects data enough to let it overrule her when the stakes are commercial rather than artistic. She laughs about being wrong on colors. “I’ve seen myself thinking like this color is going to be amazing. I’ve been wrong many times. And when you’re wrong with something as, like, in product, when it comes to color, you’re stuck with a lot of inventory and you do not want that. That is not good for business.” In a hypothetical startup challenge, where user testing clearly favors a more clinical aesthetic over a playful one the designer loves, she is clear. If this is not an art project, you ship what users are ready for. Yet she refuses to let numbers become the only voice. Asked what designers who only trust data are missing, her answer is sharp and short: “Missing their heart and soul.”

Prototyping life, not just products

Later in the conversation, Ti talks about being diagnosed with ADHD and autism as an adult. Hyperfocus on topics like gender equality, pleasure activism, and emotional design has been a quiet engine behind her work, letting her stay with difficult ideas long after others would have moved on. The flip side is that when she is not deeply interested, progress stalls. Instead of fighting this, she now uses it as part of her compass, choosing projects she knows she can stay obsessed with for years.

Underneath all the specifics of sex tech and crowdfunding, the operating system stays the same. When you cannot see the full path, you prototype. Ti treats “try, learn, iterate” as both a design tactic and a way to navigate an unconventional career. When Radhika asks if she would still design something her intuition loves even if she knows it will not sell, Ti says yes, “if I think it’s going to be a fun journey.” Some ideas exist to move markets. Some exist to keep the creative self alive. Episode 12 of Design Mindset captures that balance cleanly, showing intuition not as the opposite of research, but as the spark that tells you which risks are worth taking in the first place.

Listen to the full conversation on Design Mindset (powered by KeyShot), available every week on YouTube, to hear more insights from one of the industry’s most decorated design leaders.

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The post When Data Says No And Your Gut Says Go: What Designers Can Learn From Ti Chang first appeared on Yanko Design.

This $399 Device Can Kill Your Joint Pain Using Infrared Lasers (And Zero Side Effects)

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The first Move+ made a bold promise: what if your “painkiller” was a band of light instead of a bottle of pills? By wrapping medical-grade red and near-infrared LEDs around your joints, it tried to tackle the inflammation at the source, not just blur it out. Move+ 2.0 arrives as the next pass at that concept, with a more polished chassis, smarter ergonomics, and a clearer pitch that this is not a gadget for your shelf, but a piece of recovery infrastructure you actually wear.

The real story behind the 2.0 update is a shift in how the device delivers light. Pain, after all, is rarely skin deep. Kineon’s answer was to build a hybrid system, pairing 660nm red LEDs with 808nm near-infrared lasers. While LEDs are great for surface-level recovery, the focused, coherent light from the lasers is engineered to penetrate several centimeters deeper, reaching the actual joint capsules, cartilage, and muscle tissue where chronic inflammation hides. It’s a clever engineering choice that directly addresses the limits of LED-only panels, aiming to deliver a therapeutic dose where it truly matters, whether that’s inside a shoulder with tendinitis or a knee struggling with arthritis.

Designer: Kineon Design Labs

Click Here to Buy Now: $399 $798 (50% off). Hurry, only a few left! Raised over $58,000.

The new adjustable strap is noticeably slimmer and more pliable, designed to solve the ergonomic puzzle of wrapping something securely around tricky areas like the shoulders or glutes. With reinforced stitching, premium materials, and a quick-release function, it feels less like a medical brace and more like a piece of high-end athletic gear. Kineon also includes bridging clips to connect the modules closer together and a separate extender strap. These simple but practical additions ensure the device can comfortably fit both on smaller treatment areas and larger body types or span across the lower back, making the entire system more versatile out of the box.

Even the travel case gets a thoughtful overhaul. Finished in vegan leather with a redesigned interior, it treats the Move+ 2.0 like a piece of premium electronics, not a clunky medical aid. The new layout, with dedicated bridge holders and a simplified charging tray, is about removing the small points of friction that often lead to expensive recovery tools being left at home. It affirms the idea that for a device like this to be effective, it has to be with you when you need it, whether that’s at the gym, in a hotel room, or after a long flight.

By combining LEDs and lasers, the Move+ 2.0 is positioned to address a whole spectrum of common complaints that live deep in the body’s machinery. The issues it targets, from frozen shoulder and carpal tunnel to gout and cartilage damage, are the kind of stubborn problems that often resist simple surface treatments. The device is not just for post-workout soreness; it is designed as a tool for managing the kind of chronic, nagging conditions that can disrupt daily life.

Beyond the hardware, Kineon is building out the digital side of the recovery equation. The new companion app acts as a logbook and a coach, letting you track sessions, monitor progress, and access a library of educational videos and guided recovery programs. This turns the Move+ 2.0 from a purely physical tool into a smarter system. Instead of just treating a sore spot ad hoc, the app provides a framework for managing chronic conditions over time, offering insights and guidance that help connect the daily sessions to a longer-term healing strategy.

At just $399, the entire package feels cohesive, including not just the 3 light modules and adjustable strap, but also the travel case, a charging dock, and a USB-C charging cable. Kineon is clearly positioning the Move+ 2.0 as a serious piece of performance and recovery gear, designed to sit comfortably alongside a high-end smartwatch or a percussion massager. It’s a tool built for a wide spectrum of nagging, persistent issues, from the athlete’s case of tennis elbow to the office worker’s carpal tunnel. By wrapping sophisticated medical technology in a thoughtfully designed, user-friendly package, Kineon is making a strong argument that the future of pain management might look a lot less like a pill and a lot more like a piece of well-designed hardware.

Click Here to Buy Now: $399 $798 (50% off). Hurry, only a few left! Raised over $58,000.

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