Author Archives: Ida Torres

The Zig-Zag Chair That Shows Rimadesio at Its Most Expressive

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Every April, you could spend an entire week in Milan chasing novelty. Salone del Mobile is full of it: the flashy, the concept-heavy, the beautifully photographed pieces that look better in a press release than they ever would in a real room. That’s what makes the Ori chair by Giuseppe Bavuso for Rimadesio so easy to stop at. It looks just as interesting on paper as it probably does in person, and against everything else being shown this week, that’s already a significant thing.

At its core, it’s a solid ash chair with a backrest. Except the backrest doesn’t go straight. It zigs. It zags. And somehow, it works with a kind of quiet conviction that makes you want to understand why.

Designer: Giuseppe Bavuso for Rimadesio

Rimadesio is not exactly a newcomer to this conversation. Founded in 1956 in the Brianza district north of Milan, the Italian brand has built its reputation around precision manufacturing and architectural intelligence. For decades, it has been the brand that architects reach for when they need sliding panels, modular shelving, or doors that close with the kind of satisfying weight that makes you feel like you live in a well-designed life. Furniture, in the traditional sense, has always played a supporting role. Ori feels like a shift.

Giuseppe Bavuso has been Rimadesio’s designer and art director for years, and the long-term relationship is visible in the collection’s consistency. There’s a particular design language at Rimadesio, one that values restraint without ever feeling cold. But Ori does something slightly different. The zig-zagging backrest introduces a kind of visual energy that isn’t typical of the brand. It feels expressive in a way Rimadesio rarely allows itself to be, turning the brand’s famous manufacturing precision toward something more overtly sculptural.

The choice of material matters here. Solid ash is warm, tactile, honest. It doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t, which makes it the right call for a piece that’s already making a visual argument with its form. Against the angular drama of the backrest, the naturalness of the wood acts as a stabilizer. The chair doesn’t feel aggressive or purely decorative. It feels considered. Like a piece that was worked out over a long time before anyone was allowed to see it.

The timing is also interesting. Rimadesio is celebrating its 70th anniversary at Salone del Mobile 2026 under the concept BECOMING, a theme that brings together design, architecture, art, and relationships. Introducing a chair as expressive as Ori at this particular moment feels intentional. Seventy years is long enough to have a strong point of view. It’s also long enough to know when to surprise people.

I think about this whenever I see brands with deep institutional histories try to evolve. It doesn’t always land. Sometimes it reads as a brand chasing relevance instead of generating it, making louder and louder declarations in the hope that someone notices. But Ori doesn’t feel like that. It feels like a designer who has been sitting with an idea for a while, one that has been refined until it became undeniable.

Design, at its best, has an opinion. It makes a choice and defends it without apology. The Ori chair’s backrest could have been straight. It wasn’t. That single decision, seemingly small, changes the entire character of the piece. It makes a chair worth looking at twice, which is harder to achieve than it sounds when you’re working in a material as familiar as wood. Whether or not you’d put it in your home is almost beside the point. Ori is the kind of piece that expands the conversation about what a chair can be, especially within the vocabulary of a brand that has spent seven decades being impeccably precise rather than openly expressive. The fact that both qualities now exist side by side in this chair is what makes it compelling.

Milan Design Week runs April 20 to 26, and if you’re in the area and you’re curious to see Ori in person, you should go. Some pieces change when you’re standing in front of them. I have a feeling this is one of them.

The post The Zig-Zag Chair That Shows Rimadesio at Its Most Expressive first appeared on Yanko Design.

Camper x Issey Miyake Sneakers Started With a Book of Birds

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Not every sneaker collaboration deserves attention. Most of them follow a predictable script: take a classic silhouette, swap a few colors, slap two logos on the tongue, and call it a limited drop. Which is why when Camper and Issey Miyake unveiled the Karst Finch for SS 2026, I sat up a little straighter.

The story behind it matters. According to Satoshi Kondo, creative director of Issey Miyake’s womenswear line, the design team spent part of their development phase poring over photo books of finches and other small birds. They weren’t studying aerodynamics or engineering anything structural. They were just looking, really looking, at the richness and subtlety of bird plumage and beaks, and letting that translate into a color palette for a shoe. That’s either delightfully eccentric or genuinely brilliant. I think it’s both.

Designers: Camper x Issey Miyake

The name itself tells you a lot. “Karst” references one of Camper’s most distinctive existing silhouettes, a shoe named after a rocky geological formation known for its rugged, organically shaped terrain. The outsole of the original Karst reflects that: it has a lumpy, almost topographic quality that looks like it came up from the earth rather than out of a factory mold. “Finch” layers something entirely different on top of it, lightness, color, a kind of cheerful energy. The combination of those two words is basically a thesis statement for what this shoe is trying to do.

Camper is Spanish, practical, and deeply rooted in a no-nonsense approach to footwear. Issey Miyake is Japanese, sculptural, and preoccupied with the relationship between material, body, and movement. These two brands don’t obviously belong together, and that friction is exactly what makes this collaboration interesting. Kondo noted that both companies share a way of thinking about design that goes beyond fashion, that both engage with other creative disciplines and communities rather than operating purely within the style bubble. I believe that. You can feel it in the shoe.

The Karst Finch is built from recycled PET engineered materials, sits on a Vibram rubber outsole, and uses a ReXarge midsole with an OrthoLite recycled footbed. It’s a sustainability story told quietly, without the usual chest-thumping. The recycled polyester lining and the thoughtful material choices feel like a given here rather than a selling point, which is how it should be. And yes, it’s also genuinely comfortable, which matters more to me than it probably should when discussing something this aesthetically considered. A beautiful shoe you can’t walk in is just an expensive sculpture.

What really lands is the color approach. The pastel yellows, the muted tones, the colorways that feel like they were borrowed from a naturalist’s watercolor study: this is not the saturated, aggressive palette that usually comes with high-profile sneaker drops. It’s quieter than that. More considered. Each pair also comes with two pairs of socks for customization, which is a small detail but a telling one. It signals that whoever designed this understood the shoe doesn’t need to shout.

The Karst Finch made its public debut closing out Issey Miyake’s Spring 2026 runway at Paris Fashion Week, which is an unusual place for a sneaker to land. Runways don’t usually end with footwear as a statement piece, and it’s telling that this one did. It read as a kind of exhale after everything else on the runway, lighter, brighter, and a little more open to joy.

There’s a version of this collaboration that could have been very safe. Instead, the Karst Finch is a shoe built on genuine curiosity: about birds, about material, about what happens when a Majorcan shoe company and a Tokyo fashion house actually sit down and listen to each other. At $320, it’s not an impulse buy. But it’s the kind of thing you pick up because you want it to last, and because the story behind it is worth wearing. The Karst Finch drops globally on April 15, 2026.

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5 Containers, a Sauna, and a Rooftop Deck in Rural Vermont

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The Vermont Villa by Backcountry Containers is the kind of build that makes you reconsider everything you thought you knew about shipping container homes. Not because it’s shocking, but because it’s genuinely, quietly good.

The running joke about container homes has always been that they’re either a clever budget hack or an architect’s ego project that ends up costing twice as much as a conventional house anyway. The Vermont Villa doesn’t entirely escape that conversation, but it does manage to sit on the more convincing side of it. Backcountry Containers, a family-owned U.S. builder, stacked and arranged five shipping containers (three 20-foot units, one 40-foot, and a custom 20-foot SaunaPlunge container) into a two-story, three-bedroom, two-bath home that sits quietly in rural Vermont and looks like it genuinely belongs there.

Designer: Backcountry Containers

All five containers are painted a uniform matte black, which sounds like it could go very wrong in the middle of the New England countryside, but it actually works. The arrangement is staggered rather than just linear, creating terrace spaces on multiple levels. Against trees and open sky, the structure reads as intentional rather than industrial. The heavy modification helps too: the containers have been cut up and fitted with windows and doors that give the home a proper architectural language, rather than looking like boxes with holes punched in them.

Inside, the layout includes a full kitchen, a wet bar, two separate living areas, and a spiral staircase connecting the two floors. Natural light is the real hero of the interior. Container homes are often criticized for feeling like dim metal tubes, and Backcountry Containers clearly took that criticism to heart. The windows throughout are generous, and the open-plan approach keeps the space from feeling like you’re living inside cargo. The bedrooms and bathrooms are described as “well-appointed,” which is the kind of language designers use when the finishes are actually nice and they’d rather undersell than overpromise.

The outdoor situation is where things get genuinely interesting. Two decks, one at ground level and one on the rooftop, anchor the exterior. The views from a rooftop in that corner of the country, at almost any time of year, tend to be worth the climb. But the real conversation piece is the SaunaPlunge container: a custom 20-foot unit that combines a sauna with a three-in-one plunge pool. Cold plunging has had its cultural moment over the past few years, and integrating it directly into the home’s architecture rather than dropping a freestanding tub somewhere near the back porch feels like a legitimately smart call. It treats wellness as infrastructure, not decoration.

Container architecture has been having a sustained moment for over a decade now, and the discourse around it tends to oscillate between two poles. Either it’s framed as some radical act of sustainability (which it is, somewhat, though the modifications and insulation required complicate that story), or it gets dismissed as a design trend that doesn’t actually solve any real housing problem. Both critiques have merit. The Vermont Villa isn’t pretending to fix affordable housing. It’s a well-designed, custom-built home that happens to be made from repurposed industrial materials, and it makes no apology for that.

Backcountry Containers has been building container homes for over a decade, with features on HGTV and the DIY Network to show for it. Every project is handled by their in-house team, from design and metal fabrication to carpentry and plumbing. They know how to deliver a project that doesn’t look like a prototype or a mood board come halfway to life. The Vermont Villa is a finished home with a pool, a sauna, a rooftop deck, and enough interior square footage to feel genuinely livable for a family. That’s the benchmark container homes have been reaching toward for years, and this one clears it comfortably.

The question I keep coming back to isn’t whether container homes are worth it. It’s whether a build like this starts to shift what we consider normal. The Vermont Villa makes a decent case that it should.

The post 5 Containers, a Sauna, and a Rooftop Deck in Rural Vermont first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Leather Vessels at Milan 2026 That Feel Like They’re Breathing

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When I first came across Talia Luvaton’s work, I genuinely paused. Not because it was unexpected to see leather used in design, but because nothing about these pieces looked like leather was supposed to look. The forms were full, curved, almost muscular, more closely related to the human body than to anything you’d find in a saddle shop or a fashion house. They looked, oddly, like they were breathing.

Luvaton is a Tel Aviv-based designer and leather craft artist, and her work is rooted in what she describes as a material-driven approach, which basically means the leather tells her where to go as much as she tells it. She works exclusively with sustainable vegetable-tanned leather, shaped by hand using wet-forming techniques and custom molds. The process involves pressure, moisture, and time, three variables that make each piece genuinely impossible to replicate exactly. That’s not a marketing claim. It’s a physical fact of the material.

Designer: Talia Luvaton

Her newest project, TRACE, makes its world debut at Milan Design Week 2026, opening April 20, and it might be the most personal thing she has made so far. It began with observational drawings of the human body. Fluid, organic shapes. Lines extracted from those drawings were then translated into three-dimensional form, the leather holding onto the gesture of the body the way a cast holds the memory of what shaped it. The pieces balance tension and softness in a way that feels almost contradictory, rigid enough to hold their form, yielding enough to feel warm.

I think that tension is entirely the point. Leather, as a material, carries its own contradictions. It’s strong but supple, ancient but endlessly contemporary. Luvaton leans into all of it, refusing to let the material play just one role. TRACE reads as sculpture, as vessel, as portrait. There’s no single correct way to categorize it, and that’s not a flaw. That’s the work.

What makes Luvaton’s practice feel particularly resonant right now is how personal the foundation of it is. Both of her parents are jewelers. Her grandfather was a shoemaker, and although she never met him, she still works with some of his original tools today. That detail gets me every time. To hold a tool that someone else held, someone whose hands shaped the same kind of material, is a profound form of continuity. The making is inherited. The language of craft passes down not just through instruction but through objects, through the weight of a tool in your hand.

This depth of lineage shows up across the broader body of work she’ll present in Milan. Alongside TRACE, visitors will see TOHA, her first vessel collection; SLICE; REBLOOM; and HEALED, a series of tattooed vessels created in collaboration with professional tattoo artists who work directly onto the leather surface using electric needles. Tattooed leather vessels. The idea feels both completely logical and completely radical, and that combination is exactly the kind of design thinking worth paying attention to.

For those of us who follow craft and design closely, Luvaton’s presence at Milan feels significant for reasons beyond the work itself. This is her first time at the event, and she’s arriving not with a polished commercial line but with a practice, a set of values, and a very specific way of understanding what a material can do. At a moment when the design conversation is increasingly dominated by AI-generated forms and rapid prototyping, there’s real weight in watching someone slow everything down, put their hands in wet leather, and wait for it to tell them something.

TRACE, as a title, does exactly what it promises. It traces movement back to its origin. It traces craft back through a family. It traces the line between the body and the object, and asks you to reconsider where one ends and the other begins. That’s the kind of design work that stays with you long after you’ve left the room.

The post The Leather Vessels at Milan 2026 That Feel Like They’re Breathing first appeared on Yanko Design.

Gadhouse’s $99 Miko Is the Cassette Player the Revival Needed

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Cassette tapes are having a moment, and that moment is refusing to end. According to Billboard, cassette sales have grown more than 440% over the past decade, and in the first quarter of 2025 alone they more than doubled, hitting numbers not seen in 20 years. This isn’t a blip or a quirky indie niche. It’s a full-on cultural movement, and whether you’re old enough to remember rewinding a tape with a pencil or you’ve been hunting down limited editions on Bandcamp, you’ve probably felt its pull.

Gadhouse, the audio lifestyle brand behind some genuinely good-looking retro-inspired gear, clearly felt it too. The result is Miko, their first cassette player, and it arrives looking like it has a point to make. The design alone earns attention. Gadhouse drew heavily from the 1985 to 1995 era, a decade widely considered the peak of expressive, personality-driven consumer electronics. Miko carries that DNA through a translucent front cover that lets you watch the cassette move, an aluminum logo detail, and a compact form factor that sits satisfyingly in the hand.

Designer: Gadhouse

It comes in two colorways, Smoke and Mint, and both feel deliberately considered rather than arbitrarily chosen. The Mint version especially hits that sweet spot between vintage and current that a lot of retro-inspired products spend significant design budgets trying and failing to achieve.

Beyond the looks, Gadhouse made a smart decision not to stop at aesthetics. The Miko runs on Bluetooth 5.3, which means you can pair it with wireless headphones and walk out the door untethered. There is also a 3.5mm stereo output for those who prefer a wired setup or own a vintage pair they’re not ready to part with. Both options coexist without one feeling like an afterthought, and that kind of functional honesty is rarer than it should be in products that trade so heavily on nostalgia.

The five-button control system handles play, fast-forward, rewind, stop, and record. That last button deserves its own moment. Miko includes a built-in directional microphone, which means you can record directly onto cassette. Voice notes, song ideas, a mix tape for someone you want to impress, or a playlist you’ve actually curated rather than algorithmically generated. The format shifts from relic to creative tool pretty quickly once you remember that capability is built right in. Gadhouse has also announced plans to release their own line of blank cassette tapes and accessories later this year, which suggests they’re approaching this as a longer-term ecosystem rather than a one-and-done launch.

At 192 grams, Miko is light enough to drop into a bag without thinking twice. It runs on AA batteries and accepts USB-C power input, including directly from an iPhone, which is exactly the kind of considered detail that signals a team that actually thought about how people use things in the real world. The campaign imagery reinforces the tone they’re going for: youthful, a little editorial, tactile. It reads less like a tech launch and more like a lifestyle statement, which, for this kind of product, is probably the right call.

The cassette revival isn’t going anywhere because it was never purely about audio quality. It’s about ownership, tactility, and a kind of deliberate listening that streaming has made increasingly rare. When you play a cassette, you commit to it. You flip it, you fast-forward past songs you skipped last time, you sit with the imperfections. Holding a tape, choosing it, pressing play. That sequence means something to people. That’s not nostalgia talking, that’s human behavior. Miko seems to understand this, and it packages that understanding into something that actually functions well in 2026, without trying to be a museum piece or a tech gimmick.

The Gadhouse Miko Cassette Player is priced at $99/£59.99 and available now from the Gadhouse website and global partners, with major retailers including Amazon, HMV, Currys, Tesco, and John Lewis expected to follow. Starting April 30th, it can be bundled with Gadhouse’s Wesley Retro Headphones for $149/£109. For anyone already deep into the format or simply cassette-curious, this might be the most considered entry point on the market right now.

The post Gadhouse’s $99 Miko Is the Cassette Player the Revival Needed first appeared on Yanko Design.

Gadhouse’s $99 Miko Is the Cassette Player the Revival Needed

Posted on by

Cassette tapes are having a moment, and that moment is refusing to end. According to Billboard, cassette sales have grown more than 440% over the past decade, and in the first quarter of 2025 alone they more than doubled, hitting numbers not seen in 20 years. This isn’t a blip or a quirky indie niche. It’s a full-on cultural movement, and whether you’re old enough to remember rewinding a tape with a pencil or you’ve been hunting down limited editions on Bandcamp, you’ve probably felt its pull.

Gadhouse, the audio lifestyle brand behind some genuinely good-looking retro-inspired gear, clearly felt it too. The result is Miko, their first cassette player, and it arrives looking like it has a point to make. The design alone earns attention. Gadhouse drew heavily from the 1985 to 1995 era, a decade widely considered the peak of expressive, personality-driven consumer electronics. Miko carries that DNA through a translucent front cover that lets you watch the cassette move, an aluminum logo detail, and a compact form factor that sits satisfyingly in the hand.

Designer: Gadhouse

It comes in two colorways, Smoke and Mint, and both feel deliberately considered rather than arbitrarily chosen. The Mint version especially hits that sweet spot between vintage and current that a lot of retro-inspired products spend significant design budgets trying and failing to achieve.

Beyond the looks, Gadhouse made a smart decision not to stop at aesthetics. The Miko runs on Bluetooth 5.3, which means you can pair it with wireless headphones and walk out the door untethered. There is also a 3.5mm stereo output for those who prefer a wired setup or own a vintage pair they’re not ready to part with. Both options coexist without one feeling like an afterthought, and that kind of functional honesty is rarer than it should be in products that trade so heavily on nostalgia.

The five-button control system handles play, fast-forward, rewind, stop, and record. That last button deserves its own moment. Miko includes a built-in directional microphone, which means you can record directly onto cassette. Voice notes, song ideas, a mix tape for someone you want to impress, or a playlist you’ve actually curated rather than algorithmically generated. The format shifts from relic to creative tool pretty quickly once you remember that capability is built right in. Gadhouse has also announced plans to release their own line of blank cassette tapes and accessories later this year, which suggests they’re approaching this as a longer-term ecosystem rather than a one-and-done launch.

At 192 grams, Miko is light enough to drop into a bag without thinking twice. It runs on AA batteries and accepts USB-C power input, including directly from an iPhone, which is exactly the kind of considered detail that signals a team that actually thought about how people use things in the real world. The campaign imagery reinforces the tone they’re going for: youthful, a little editorial, tactile. It reads less like a tech launch and more like a lifestyle statement, which, for this kind of product, is probably the right call.

The cassette revival isn’t going anywhere because it was never purely about audio quality. It’s about ownership, tactility, and a kind of deliberate listening that streaming has made increasingly rare. When you play a cassette, you commit to it. You flip it, you fast-forward past songs you skipped last time, you sit with the imperfections. Holding a tape, choosing it, pressing play. That sequence means something to people. That’s not nostalgia talking, that’s human behavior. Miko seems to understand this, and it packages that understanding into something that actually functions well in 2026, without trying to be a museum piece or a tech gimmick.

The Gadhouse Miko Cassette Player is priced at $99/£59.99 and available now from the Gadhouse website and global partners, with major retailers including Amazon, HMV, Currys, Tesco, and John Lewis expected to follow. Starting April 30th, it can be bundled with Gadhouse’s Wesley Retro Headphones for $149/£109. For anyone already deep into the format or simply cassette-curious, this might be the most considered entry point on the market right now.

The post Gadhouse’s $99 Miko Is the Cassette Player the Revival Needed first appeared on Yanko Design.

Vancouver’s First Supertall Was Inspired by the Ocean Floor

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Vancouver has always had good bones. The mountains, the water, the way the city sits between them like it was planned by someone with an eye for drama. But for all its natural beauty, its skyline has played it relatively safe. That’s about to change, and the agent of disruption is, of all things, a sea sponge.

Henriquez Partners Architects, a local Vancouver studio, has unveiled designs for 595 West Georgia Street, a 1,033-foot tower that will become the city’s first-ever supertall skyscraper. To earn that designation, a building has to exceed 984 feet, which puts 595 West Georgia just barely in that club and makes it a landmark before a single floor has been built. It’s the centerpiece of a larger trio called Georgia & Abbott, developed by Holborn Group, but this one is clearly the main event.

Designer: Henriquez Partners Architects

The design draws from the glass sea sponge reefs, specifically hexactinellids, found off the coast of British Columbia. These aren’t the bath sponges you’re picturing. They’re ancient, rare, deep-sea organisms with a crystalline skeletal structure that is simultaneously porous and structurally formidable. Henriquez Partners didn’t just borrow the idea aesthetically; they borrowed it structurally. The building is wrapped in a steel exoskeleton clad in white Glass Fibre Reinforced Polymer panelling, with highly translucent spans of glass filling the rest. That external framework carries the structural loads, which means fewer internal columns, more open floor plates, and a surface that looks woven and textured rather than sealed and flat.

That last distinction matters more than it sounds. Glass-box towers have dominated skylines for decades, and while some are genuinely beautiful, most are just reflective. They bounce light around and blend into each other. 595 West Georgia is going for something different: depth. The lattice of the exoskeleton creates shadows and layers depending on where you’re standing and what time of day it is. It moves, visually, in a way that most modern towers simply don’t, which makes looking at it feel more like watching a living surface than a fixed object.

Henriquez Partners described the design as telling “a story that is unique to British Columbia.” That kind of regional specificity is increasingly rare in architecture, where global firms often produce work that could exist in Dubai just as easily as Dallas. The fact that this building could only make sense in Vancouver, because the glass sponge is native to BC’s coastal waters, gives it a conceptual integrity that goes beyond branding. It’s a building that knows where it lives.

The program is equally considered. 595 West Georgia will function as a hotel tower, with conference facilities, a rooftop restaurant, and a publicly accessible observation deck at the top that will be free for Vancouverites to visit. That detail alone shifts the building’s relationship to the city. A supertall designed to be shared with the public rather than sealed off for guests feels like a genuine gesture, and it suggests that the architects and developer thought about this tower as part of the city’s fabric, not just its skyline profile.

The whole project sits at a compelling intersection of ideas. It’s biomimicry applied at an urban scale, which is a growing conversation in both design and engineering. It’s also a statement about what cities are willing to reach for, literally and figuratively. Vancouver has been measured about its height limits for years, and for good reason. The city’s low-rise character has long been part of its identity. Greenlighting a supertall signals that the city is ready to stretch those boundaries, and having one that can argue its design philosophy this clearly makes that shift feel earned.

Whether 595 West Georgia turns out to be as striking in person as the renderings suggest is something only construction can answer. But the foundational idea, that the most interesting path forward might look like something pulled from the ocean floor, is exactly the kind of thinking that makes architecture worth paying attention to right now. Not every city gets to say its most ambitious tower was modeled after an organism that’s been living quietly underwater for centuries. Vancouver gets to say that.

The post Vancouver’s First Supertall Was Inspired by the Ocean Floor first appeared on Yanko Design.

Disney and NatGeo Built Billboards That Bees Can Actually Live In

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Most billboards are built to be noticed and then forgotten. You see them, you process whatever they’re selling, and then they fade into the visual noise of the street. So when a campaign comes along that flips that formula entirely, it genuinely stops you in your tracks.

That’s exactly what’s happening in Manchester right now, where Disney and National Geographic, working with creative agency Meanwhile, have installed a series of billboards designed to do more than advertise. The structures, which the team calls “bloomboards,” are fitted with built-in cavities, textured surfaces, and planting elements that turn them into functioning habitats for bees. Not a two-week stunt. Not a PR photo op. Permanent installations, built from sustainably sourced cedar that had already been felled, placed across parks and public spaces throughout the city.

Designer: Meanwhile for Disney and National Geographic

The campaign ties to the launch of National Geographic’s Secrets of the Bees, a documentary series presented by explorer Bertie Gregory and executive produced by James Cameron. The series was filmed over several years using specialized cameras to capture bee behavior at a level of detail most of us have never seen. Entomologist Dr. Samuel Ramsey provided scientific input throughout. It’s streaming now on Disney+ and Hulu, and from a content standpoint alone, it sounds like essential viewing.

But the billboard work is where this becomes interesting as a piece of design thinking, not just marketing. Rather than placing a nature image on a billboard and calling it Earth Month, Meanwhile built the message into the medium. The physical structure becomes an argument for the cause. The billboard doesn’t just tell you bees matter; it gives them somewhere to live. Mini bee hotels have also been placed at several locations across Manchester, including Chorlton Water Park, Wythenshawe Park, Fletcher Moss Botanical Garden, and the Northern Quarter. Like the bloomboards, these aren’t decorative gestures. They’re functional, permanent additions to the urban landscape, and that distinction matters when the campaign is rooted in conservation.

Rachel Miles, creative director at Meanwhile, put it simply: “Our ambition is to encourage people to plant their own mix of shrubs and perennials to support bee populations and create a positive impact.” Michael Tsim, also a creative director at the agency, was just as direct: “Not just a two week campaign, but something they actually benefit from, permanently.”

That word, permanently, is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Environmental advertising has a long history of looking good while changing nothing. Companies run campaigns during Earth Month and then quietly move on. What makes this campaign feel different is that the outcomes are baked into the design itself. The bees don’t need to watch the documentary to benefit. The habitat exists regardless of whether anyone scans a QR code or downloads an app.

It also speaks to a broader shift in how thoughtful brands are approaching cause-driven work. The bar for audiences has risen sharply. People can spot the difference between a brand that has added a green ribbon to its logo and one that has committed real resources to a problem. Embedding a working habitat into an advertising structure is a tangible commitment, and one you can’t undo when April ends.

For anyone who follows design, this campaign is a reminder that the best work often finds its power in constraints. A billboard is a flat surface with a job to do. Meanwhile used that constraint not as a limitation but as a starting point, and the result is something genuinely unusual. Form serves function, function serves form, and both serve something beyond the campaign itself. Whether or not you plan to watch Secrets of the Bees (though I’d argue you should), the billboard project stands on its own as a piece of design worth paying attention to. It’s an example of what happens when a brief asks for more than attention and a creative team decides to take that seriously.

The post Disney and NatGeo Built Billboards That Bees Can Actually Live In first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Kids’ Phone With No Screen, No Apps, and Only $100

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The moment you see the Tin Can, you know exactly what it is and also what it isn’t. It’s a landline phone, complete with a handheld receiver and a curly cord, designed to sit on a countertop or mount on a wall. It isn’t a smartphone. It isn’t a tablet. It doesn’t have a screen. And that’s entirely the point.

Tin Can is the brainchild of three Seattle-based dads: Chet Kittleson, Max Blumen, and Graeme Davies, who created it after hitting the same wall millions of parents run into. Their kids were at that in-between age, old enough to want independence and social connection, but too young to be handed a device with unrestricted internet access. The options available were either too much or not enough. As the founders put it: “Everything out there felt like a compromise, too much tech, too much access, or just another screen to manage.” So they built something else entirely.

Designers: Chet Kittleson, Max Blumen, and Graeme Davies

The Tin Can works through Wi-Fi but without any browsing capability, social media, or texting. Children can only call and receive calls from a parent-approved list of contacts, managed through a companion app that only parents can access. Quiet hours and Do Not Disturb can be scheduled. Voicemails are supported. That’s it. That’s the whole phone. And it turns out, that’s more than enough.

From a design standpoint, the product is refreshingly considered. The cylindrical Tin Can model has a playful, almost cartoonish quality that looks deliberate rather than dated. Its colorful palette, with names like “Answer Me Aquamarine,” signals that this wasn’t designed to collect dust in a hallway. The other model, the Flashback, leans harder into nostalgia, styled after the wall-mounted phones of the 1980s and connecting via ethernet cable rather than Wi-Fi. Both feel like products made by people who actually thought about what a child’s first phone should feel like, not just what it should do.

I’ll be honest, my initial reaction to this was mild skepticism. We’ve seen “screen-free” devices for kids before, and they tend to be clunky, joyless compromises that kids tolerate for about two weeks before losing interest. Tin Can feels genuinely different. Part of that is the design, which doesn’t try to mimic a smartphone and fail. It commits fully to being a phone, a beautiful, strange little object that sits in your home and rings. Part of it is the clarity of the concept. The product makes no attempt to sneak in “just a little” content or add a casual app or two for good measure. That restraint is its biggest strength.

The market response has been telling. Since launching, Tin Can has reached users in all 50 US states and across Canada, raised $3.5 million in funding, and sold through its first batches fast enough to crash at Christmas. The founders have described the reception as overwhelming, and it’s not hard to see why. Parents have been waiting for exactly this, a middle ground between total dependence on mom’s phone and a fully connected smartphone, and no one had bothered to build it yet.

What also makes Tin Can compelling is that it re-centers something communication technologies quietly stripped away: the social ritual of calling someone. You pick up the receiver, you dial, you wait, and you talk. No typing, no video filters, no leaving someone on read. It’s a more focused, more present kind of connection, and kids who grow up with it might just develop a better instinct for actual conversation.

The Luddite movement has spent years arguing that smartphones reached kids too early and too fast. Tin Can doesn’t join that argument. It sidesteps it entirely by offering something genuinely useful, beautifully designed, and completely free of the features that make smartphones so hard to put down. Whether you call it nostalgia or just good design thinking, the result is the same: a phone worth answering.

The post The Kids’ Phone With No Screen, No Apps, and Only $100 first appeared on Yanko Design.

The World’s First T-Rex Leather Handbag Will Cost You $663,000

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Did you ever think to yourself, what if I had a bag made from an extinct million-year-old animal? I mean, people do have bags made from cows, sheep, goats, and even crocodiles, snakes, and lizards. So why not have something from a really exotic animal that doesn’t exist anymore?

Well, apparently there are people, specifically those from techwear label Enfin Levé, who did think of that and have now come up with the world’s first ever T-Rex Leather™ Handbag. And obviously, this time around, no actual animals were harmed in making this one-of-a-kind luxury handbag.

Designer: Enfin Levé

What they used to actually make the bag is lab-grown material that scientists engineered using reconstructed dinosaur collagen. They reconstructed collagen sequences from 66-million-year-old T.Rex fossils that were eventually turned into real leather and now into a luxury handbag that collectors (with money) will probably rush to add to their cabinet (and maybe not actually use). Design-wise, the bag has a sleek and angular silhouette in a striking deep teal color. There are even three decorative incisions in the design that look like dinosaur scratch marks, to add a bit of “realism” to the bag. There is also a DNA helix-styled hardware connecting the strap to the bag.

Now, what makes this more than just a wild concept is actually what went into the leather itself. The T-Rex Leather™ isn’t some glorified synthetic material trying to pass as the real thing. It was developed by three collaborators: creative agency VML, genomic engineering company The Organoid Company, and biotech pioneer Lab-Grown Leather Ltd., and the result is a material that is apparently structurally identical to traditional leather. It’s durable, biodegradable, repairable, and fully traceable. So not only are you carrying something from 66 million years ago, but you’re also carrying something that is arguably better for the planet than your average luxury leather good. No animal slaughter, no deforestation, no heavy-chemical tanning process involved. In a weird twist of fate, the most ancient leather is also the most future-forward.

Enfin Levé’s founder and lead designer, Michal Hadas, put it perfectly when he said the goal was never to force the material into “familiar codes of luxury.” Instead, he let the T-Rex leather speak for itself, figuring out where it resists, how it holds tension, and letting all of that shape the final design. Which honestly? That kind of design philosophy is exactly why this bag feels so different from anything else out there.

The bag is currently on display at the Art Zoo Museum in Amsterdam and is displayed alongside a colossal life-size T. Rex skeleton cast from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, Netherlands. It will be there until May 11, in case you’re in town. But in case you thought there would be a slew of people carrying the T-Rex bag around, there is actually only one that exists in the world. It will be auctioned off to the highest bidder with the bid starting at around $663,000.

As for whether T-Rex leather will ever make it to the mass market, don’t hold your breath just yet, but don’t completely give up hope either. The plan is to eventually make the material available to luxury brands, starting with high-end accessories before expanding into other industries like automotive. So who knows, a T-Rex leather interior in your next car might not be as far-fetched as it sounds. For now though, this bag belongs to the world of the rare and extraordinary, right where it should be. Whether you’re a serious collector, a fashion obsessive, or someone who just really, really loves dinosaurs, there’s no denying that the Enfin Levé T-Rex Leather Handbag is genuinely unlike anything that has ever existed before. And at $663,000, well, some things truly are one of a kind.

The post The World’s First T-Rex Leather Handbag Will Cost You $663,000 first appeared on Yanko Design.