Tag Archives: Product Design

You can now drive Koenigsegg’s 1,600-HP GT1 racecar that never saw the grid

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Some cars are born to race, and the Koenigsegg CCGT was built for that very purpose, yet never got the chance to compete. Nearly two decades later, the Swedish brand has turned that unfinished chapter into something extraordinary. This is the CCGT1, a road-legal megacar that brings the spirit of the abandoned GT1 project to modern roads and racetracks. The limited-edition model is based on the CC850 and pays homage to the original CCGT, of which only one was ever built.

The original CCGT was conceived as a GT1 competition machine with a lightweight 1,000-kg chassis and naturally aspirated 5.0-liter V8. It showed considerable promise in testing, but changes to FIA regulations made the car ineligible before it could fulfill its racing destiny. The CCGT1 effectively gives that lost idea a second life, although in a radically more powerful and road-usable form with the signature Koenigsegg flair.

Designer: Koenigsegg

Almost every body panel has been redesigned, with the doors and removable roof being the notable exceptions. Its most dramatic feature is the enormous active rear wing, which works alongside the front splitter, sculpted underfloor and active aerodynamic systems to generate up to 800 kg of downforce at 250 km/h. Integrated NACA ducts and a bespoke roof scoop also help keep the car composed and cool during extended track sessions.

Power comes from the in-house twin-turbo V8, producing 1,280 hp on pump fuel and 1,600 hp on E85, with the engine capable of running on blends of the two. Power reaches the rear wheels through the Light Speed Transmission, paired with Koenigsegg’s new Sequential Shift system. The setup brings a race-inspired sequential lever, clutch pedal and clutchless ignition-cut shifts, while buyers can alternatively choose the Engage Shift System, which combines a gated six-speed manual interface with automatic operation. Paddle shifting remains available with both configurations.

The cockpit follows the same uncompromising philosophy. Lightweight carbon-fiber seats, six-point harnesses, a third-generation Chronocluster display and a driver-focused layout give it a distinctly competition-inspired character. Koenigsegg also introduces Ghost Fibre, a proprietary white carbon-fiber material derived from the Trevita project that combines reduced weight with greater strength and sound-deadening properties.

For owners seeking an even more focused experience, the optional factory-designed track package adds a carbon roll cage, racing seats, fire suppression, race exhaust, air jacks, track-oriented suspension and brakes, enhanced aerodynamics and dedicated track wheels and tires. Buyers also receive access to exclusive CCGT1 track days with factory support.

Koenigsegg will produce just 70 examples of the CCGT1, and all have already been allocated. The provided official and referenced sources do not disclose an official price, so no confirmed figure can be stated. What is clear, however, is that the CCGT1 is more than another extreme hypercar. The racer is Koenigsegg’s way of finally allowing an idea that never reached the starting grid to live out its racing ambitions – this time with a license plate!

The post You can now drive Koenigsegg’s 1,600-HP GT1 racecar that never saw the grid first appeared on Yanko Design.

Beni Is What Sony Aibo Grew Up to Be – A $549 Camera Robot That Captures Life While You Live It

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Every camera product ever made has one thing in common: it needs you to operate it. A gimbal needs a hand to hold it. A drone needs a pilot with eyes on a controller. An action cam mounts somewhere on your body, which means it films from your body, not at it. Even the smartest AI tracking stand on the market still requires you to set it up, point it at where you’ll roughly be, and go do something interesting within its field of view. All of this adds up to a life spent maneuvering cameras instead of being in front of them, and the shots that matter most, the ones where you’re actually doing the thing, are consistently the ones you’re missing from.

Beni, from Palo Alto startup Mondo Robotics, is the robot that plays camera crew. It rides on four wheels, films in 4K HDR with 3-axis stabilization, hits 17.9 mph, and clears 10-inch obstacles mid-chase, getting itself back upright after a fall without any help from you. The team includes engineers from DJI and Tesla’s Optimus program, which explains how a 3.86-pound consumer robot ends up with hardware like that. It also has color-changing expressive eyes, a swappable hat, a name, and a personality that comes through in little nods and head shakes. That design language places Beni in a tradition Sony’s Aibo started in 1999, building robots people actually want to be around. The engineering is serious, the warmth is deliberate, and the combination puts Beni in territory most robotics products actively avoid.

Designer: Mondo Robotics

Click here to Buy Now: $549 $799 (31% off). Hurry, only 39/230 left! Raised over $2.8 million.

The choice to give a camera robot a face, a name, and a wardrobe is a design statement, not a marketing gimmick. Beni’s eyes change color and express emotions, it nods and shakes its head, and the whole body is customizable through swappable hats, ear attachments, and protection plates, in whatever combination suits you. The character design sits somewhere between a cartoon character and a precision instrument, which sounds like a contradiction and somehow isn’t. Mondo Robotics understood that emotional connection determines how often a device actually leaves the house. A robot you find charming is one you take outside. One that reads like a spec sheet stays in the drawer.

Beni measures 8.5 by 7.1 by 7.1 inches and weighs 3.86 pounds, light enough to throw in a bag. It hits 17.9 mph (28.8 kph) to keep pace with skateboarders and runners, clears up to 10-inch obstacles to handle curbs and stairs, dodges obstacles with onboard sensing, and self-rights when it tips over. The self-recovery system sounds like a footnote until you actually send Beni across gravel and watch it eat dirt, bounce back up, and continue tracking without a second of interruption. A creator who ran it through grass, gravel, trails, and concrete stairs for a full week reported footage that never stopped rolling. That kind of reliability is what separates a robot from a gadget.

The camera shoots 4K with HDR coloring that handles extreme lighting without manual adjustment. HybridFlow Stabilization combines four-axis mechanical and electronic stabilization, which keeps footage smooth even when Beni is clattering across rough terrain at full speed. Storage is 32GB internally with a microSD slot for expansion. Everything core, tracking, filming, obstacle avoidance, runs entirely on-device, and your footage stays on the robot’s local storage. The only cloud connection Beni ever makes is for the optional AI auto-editing feature, and only when you explicitly give permission. For a camera product in 2026, that’s a privacy setup worth paying attention to.

Tail tracking, side tracking, front tracking, and circle tracking give Beni four distinct cinematic modes, each producing footage that most solo filmers never actually get to see. Tail mode keeps Beni behind you at pace, a proper chase-cam shot without anyone chasing. Side mode locks it right beside you, framing you against the rushing landscape the way a Hollywood tracking rig would. Front mode has Beni reversing ahead while filming your face, which turns out to be unusually good for capturing effort and expression mid-activity. Circle mode sends it into a continuous 360-degree orbit for sweeping hero shots. The magnetic Motion Tracker, worn on your wrist or clipped to your bag, keeps Beni locked on even when you briefly move out of frame, and doubles as a manual controller for directing movement without touching your phone.

Beni’s auto-editing feature builds highlights from your raw footage using AI models that Mondo Robotics has customized, so you’re not manually scrubbing through hours of clips for ten good seconds. The company is clear that this is the only opt-in cloud feature; every other function runs locally. Pilot Mode sits at the other end of the control spectrum, letting you drive Beni manually from your phone for footage from its low-slung ground-level perspective. The vantage point is genuinely unlike anything a handheld camera can produce, just by virtue of where the lens sits relative to the ground.

Battery life runs 1.5 hours per charge, with a swappable design that stretches to 4.5 hours across three batteries. The Standard Combo, including Beni, Motion Tracker, hat, chest protection plate, and one battery, is available at $549 (discounted from the $799 retail price). The Explore Combo adds three batteries, a charging hub, and off-road wheels for $699. Individual add-ons, including extra batteries at $59, off-road wheel pairs at $9, ears and hats packs at $9, and protection plates at $9, are available separately. Every unit comes with a 12-month limited warranty from the date of activation, and global customer support is available at mondorobotics.com. Shipping covers the US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Australia, and New Zealand, with customs fees included on a flat $10 shipping fee.

Click here to Buy Now: $549 $799 (31% off). Hurry, only 39/230 left! Raised over $2.8 million.

The post Beni Is What Sony Aibo Grew Up to Be – A $549 Camera Robot That Captures Life While You Live It first appeared on Yanko Design.

These Contemporary Chairs Turn Sustainability and Stillness Into Design

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A chair can be a surprisingly effective storytelling device. Give it a different material, soften a familiar silhouette, or borrow a gesture from somewhere unexpected, and suddenly it becomes more than somewhere to sit. Jaro Kose’s CUT and ZEN chairs approach that idea from two very different directions: one gives discarded material a second life, while the other translates the meditative landscape of a Japanese Zen garden into an upholstered form.

CUT is, at first glance, a fairly restrained wooden chair. Its clean oak frame, gently rounded proportions and broad backrest give it the familiarity of a classic dining chair, while its stackable construction makes it practical enough for both residential and public environments. The design also extends into upholstered and high-chair variations without losing the clarity of the original silhouette. But one version of CUT changes the story through material alone.

Designer: Jaro Kose

 

Sustainability plays an important role in Kose’s design approach, particularly in considering how materials are sourced, used and eventually given another life. Reflecting the client’s own commitment to sustainability, a version of CUT replaces the conventional seat and backrest with components made from recycled plastic.

Instead of disguising the material’s previous life, the chair celebrates it. The recycled surface has a visibly speckled texture, almost terrazzo-like from a distance, creating a sharp contrast against the quieter wooden frame. The project explores several possible recycled finishes, turning what could have been treated purely as an environmental choice into part of the chair’s visual character.

There is something appealing about that transformation. A material once categorized as waste returns as the element that gives the chair its personality. Sustainability here is not added as a label after the design is finished; it becomes visible in the object itself. CUT suggests that responsible material choices do not necessarily have to make furniture feel overtly ecological or compromise a refined interior aesthetic. Waste can simply become another raw material to design with.

ZEN moves in almost the opposite direction. Instead of beginning with a material question, the armchair begins with a feeling.

Its inspiration comes from Japanese Zen gardens, spaces historically associated with meditation and contemplation. Their carefully positioned stones and raked gravel create compositions that feel almost motionless while still suggesting movement. Kose translates that relationship into a chair designed around softness, stillness and visual calm.

The connection is immediately recognizable. The generous upholstered seat resembles a smooth stone, except here the expected hardness has been replaced with foam and fabric. Behind it, a series of rounded concentric forms creates the backrest, echoing the repetitive lines drawn through gravel around rocks in a Zen garden.

It is a wonderfully literal reference without becoming novelty furniture. The chair still reads clearly as a contemporary lounge piece, but once you understand the inspiration, the relationship between every element becomes obvious. The seat becomes the stone; the backrest becomes the energy radiating around it.

That softness also gives ZEN an interesting presence within an interior. Fully upholstered furniture is already common in contemporary residential spaces, so the material itself allows the chair to blend naturally into its surroundings. Its unusually rounded proportions and graphic backrest, however, make sure it never completely disappears.

CUT and ZEN ultimately tell two stories about contemporary living. CUT asks what happens when designers reconsider the materials we have already used, while ZEN looks at how furniture can encourage a different relationship with our surroundings and ourselves. One gives waste another life. The other turns a meditative landscape into something you can sink into. And both show how a relatively simple chair can carry a surprisingly rich idea.

The post These Contemporary Chairs Turn Sustainability and Stillness Into Design first appeared on Yanko Design.

LEGO x Nike Air Force 1 is set for take-off with a 360° dunking minifig onboard

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LEGO and Nike are back with their new themed set. This time it’s the Air Force 1 Space-Themed Building Set that seems en route to orbit and beyond, leaving nothing but its exhaust plume behind. If you’ve been following, this is not the first such collaborative model. LEGO x Nike started their collaboration of kicks, bricks, and a whole lot of fan love with the co-branded Nike Dunk x LEGO Set.

Since then, the inspiring duo has not looked back. Giving sneakerheads, builders, and those who live in the spirit of basketball, a new set with playful details almost every year. Ideal for kids aged 9+ and adults alike, over the years, Nike Slam Dunk and the Nike Dunk Trickshot, the bright yellow Air Max Dn, and the iconic Air Max 95 LEGO sets have swayed us big time, and now the AF1 is here with similar intention.

Designer: LEGO x NikeLEGO x Nike

The LEGO x Nike Air Force 1 building set was officially announced with its first look on the LEGO website just recently. A nod to the Nike Air Force 1 sneaker, first launched in 1982, the set comprises 1,093 pieces and measures over 10.5 inches high, 14 inches wide and 4 inches deep. Alongside the sneaker, the interactive set features other antics to make it really interesting to see and fun to build. The space-themed build has the basketball sneaker as the highlight, but it shares base with kinetic display elements that are, of course, an eminent part of the build.

The Air Force 1 itself, ready for launch, comes in a clean white colorway with an orange Swoosh logo. The Swoosh is removable and replaceable with a silver logo, which resembles the heel collar ascent of the sneaker. The set, as mentioned, is not about the sneaker alone. Assembled on a base with traction patterns resembling the Air Force 1 outsole, it is centered around a large blue-colored AF1 sign.

The basketball setting on the base is made interesting with a LEGO spaceman minifigure, with Nike styling, mounted onto a mechanical rig and stationed on the AF1 sign with a basketball hoop just in the front. The minifigure features an interchangeable head and is attached to an integrated dial, which can be turned to let the minifig pull off one of the most difficult basketball moves. It can do a full 360-degree dunk by spinning mid-air before slamming the ball through the hoop.

An eye-pleasing conglomeration in white, blue and yellow, this LEGO x Nike Air Force 1 set will begin shipping from September 1, 2026. It will be available through LEGO for $100; a price point that should push you to get this streetwear decor for your desk, shelf, or bedside table.

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Mac mini M5 May Get Skipped Entirely as Apple Tests M6 and M5 Pro Combo

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Feeling like you’ve heard this before? You sort of have. Last year Apple quietly shipped a Mac Studio with mismatched M4 Max and M3 Ultra chips, and buyers barely blinked, since Studio shoppers expect spec weirdness. Now the same move looks headed for the Mac mini, the one Mac people buy precisely because it is simple, affordable, and predictable. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is testing units that pair a new M6 chip with a carried over M5 Pro.

That is an odd combination to put inside Apple’s most straightforward computer. The Mac mini has never asked buyers to think twice about chip lineage, and now it may become the clearest example yet of how messy Apple’s silicon strategy has gotten.

Design: Apple

The mismatch traces back to a decision Apple made months earlier, and it has nothing to do with the Mac mini specifically. Apple canceled the M6 Pro and M6 Max outright, choosing to fast track the AI focused M7 lineup instead of building a Pro tier that would have been outdated within months of shipping. That leaves a gap in the middle of the chip family, and the Mac mini’s step up configuration is the one stuck filling it with last year’s silicon. I get the engineering logic. I still think it is a rough position to put a customer in.

Here is the part that will annoy anyone who buys on spec sheets alone. An M5 Pro comfortably beats a base M6 on the multi core and graphics work that Pro tier buyers actually care about, so the generation label is closer to marketing noise than a real downgrade. Performance wise, the pricier mini still wins. But nobody wants to spend more money and watch the box on the shelf next to it wear a newer number. Apple has spent a decade training customers to read chip generations as a shorthand for how current a machine is, and this configuration quietly breaks that shorthand.

There is a supply chain story sitting underneath all of this too, and it is worth naming. The global memory shortage that pushed MacBook Pro prices up by three hundred dollars in June is the same pressure shaping this roadmap. Apple already pulled higher RAM configurations from some Mac mini and Mac Studio models earlier this year, and Gurman’s own reporting notes the mismatched mini’s exact chip and memory setup still depends on how memory supply plays out. None of this is locked in yet. Testing configurations shift constantly, and Apple has not committed to a release window.

What makes this genuinely interesting from a design standpoint is the mini’s shell. That aluminum box has not changed since the M4 redesign in 2024, and it may end up carrying three chip generations without a single exterior update. Apple has effectively split the Mac mini’s identity in two, treating the outside as a fixed platform and the inside as a variable it can rearrange however the roadmap demands. That is a different kind of product thinking than the tidy, synchronized launches Apple built its reputation on.

Whether that flexibility reads as smart engineering or a confusing shopping experience will depend entirely on how Apple prices and markets the two configurations when they actually arrive. For now, anyone holding out for a clean M5 Mac mini should probably let that expectation go. The machine that shows up later this year might carry a name nobody predicted, wrapped in a body nobody will notice changed at all.

 

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7 Best Japanese Designs of August 2026

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Japanese design doesn’t arrive loudly. It earns attention through material weight, mechanical silence, or the way a surface catches light in a room you’ve stopped consciously decorating. August has produced seven objects that operate this way — products shaped by restraint, informed by craft, and released without fanfare. Some live in kitchens. Some belong in pockets. All of them communicate the same underlying conviction: that the best version of any object has nothing left to remove from it.

What makes a Japanese design worth living with rather than merely admiring is rarely visible at first glance. It is the decision to strip out the last superfluous element, the material chosen for how it will behave in ten years rather than ten minutes, the tolerance engineered so precisely that the mechanism disappears from awareness entirely. The seven designs here span kitchens, desks, blazer pockets, and bathroom shelves. What connects them is a refusal to negotiate with compromise, which has always been the engine of Japanese design at its most honest.

1. Paper Razor

The Paper Razor from Japan’s Kai Group asks a question the shaving industry has been avoiding for decades: why does a disposable razor need to be made of plastic? The answer, it turns out, is that it doesn’t. Built almost entirely from water-resistant paper stock similar to milk carton material, the razor ships as a flat-pack five millimeters thick and snaps into a rigid ergonomic handle in seconds. It weighs four grams. It reduces plastic use by ninety-eight percent compared to a conventional disposable. The origami-inspired body assembles without instructions and holds together with the kind of quiet structural confidence that only arrives when someone has thought very carefully about a simple problem.

The paper body holds up to temperatures of 104°F, and the metal blade head features a notched channel on top for clean rinsing between strokes. It ships in five colorways — ocean blue, botanical red, jade green, sunny yellow, and sand beige — and was designed primarily for travelers who understand that what they carry makes a statement about what they believe. The Kai Group, one of Japan’s most respected cutlery manufacturers, didn’t produce a sustainable razor that performs adequately. They produced one that makes every plastic alternative look like an idea that was never quite finished.

What we like

  • The 5mm flat-pack construction ships and stores in a fraction of the space required by any conventional disposable, making it genuinely suited to a travel kit, carry-on pouch, or gym bag
  • Reducing plastic by ninety-eight percent without compromising ergonomics or shave quality treats sustainability as a design outcome rather than a marketing position, which is a meaningful distinction

What we dislike

  • Single-use by design, which creates real tension for anyone building a long-term shaving routine around reusable hardware and reduced lifetime waste
  • Water resistance caps at 104°F, meaning very high-temperature showers may begin to compromise the paper body’s structural integrity before a shave is completed

2. Infinite Solas Lamp

Koki Sato began the Infinite Solas with a single observation: the quality of light a person needs changes throughout the day, and almost no lamp accounts for that in its design. The response is a cordless, height-adjustable lamp whose column extends continuously from 8.9 to 19.7 inches with no fixed stops or preset notches to settle for, whose magnetic ball-joint head redirects freely in any direction without moving the lamp itself, and whose single-touch control shifts color temperature from 4000K focused and cool down to 2500K soft and warm. It is not a smart lamp. It is a considered one.

The detachable magnetic head lifts away from the column and functions as a fully independent portable light — set it on a surface, attach it magnetically to compatible steel, or reach for it during a power outage. At full brightness, the built-in battery sustains six to seven hours of use. At ten percent, it runs for up to seventy hours. USB-C brings it back to full charge in roughly four hours. Sato holds the German Design Award Gold, the iF Design Award, and the Good Design Award, and serves as a specially appointed associate professor at Chiba University’s Design Research Institute. The lamp makes a convincing case for all three distinctions.

Click Here to Buy Now: $325.00

What we like

  • Continuous height adjustment with no fixed stops means the lamp adapts to precisely how you are working rather than to the nearest available preset notch, which changes how the lamp actually fits into daily use
  • The detachable magnetic head lifts cleanly away to become a self-contained portable light, expanding the lamp’s usefulness across contexts without adding any additional complexity to the form

What we dislike

  • At $325, the entry price is commensurate with the pedigree behind the design, which makes it a deliberate, considered purchase rather than an impulse one for most budgets
  • A four-hour recharge window means some planning is needed if the lamp will be in heavy use across a full day without access to its USB-C cable

3. Mitsubishi Bread Oven

Most toasters heat bread. The Mitsubishi Bread Oven treats it with something closer to respect. Built around a sealed thermal-insulated structure that borrows directly from the company’s rice cooker engineering, this oven traps moisture inside the bread rather than driving it out during cooking. Two heated plates seal around a single slice and reach temperatures of up to 500°F, transferring heat evenly and producing toast that stays genuinely fluffy at the center while finishing correctly at the crust. The retro veneer-brown exterior looks like it arrived from the 1980s and settled in because it had no reason to leave.

Four cooking settings – Toast, Frozen Toast, Topping, and French Toast – cover the full range of morning intentions. Four thickness options running from 15mm to 30mm accommodate everything from a standard sandwich slice to a thick-cut brioche. Five baking preferences, from Fluffy through Light, Normal, Dark, and Crisp, give this a resolution that most kitchen appliances reserve for far more complex tasks. “We wanted to focus on the single slice, and treat it with respect,” said Akihiro Iwahara, who led technical development at Mitsubishi Electric’s home-appliances division. One slot, no shortcuts, no compromise on the one thing it was built to do.

What we like

  • The sealed thermal-insulated structure keeps the bread’s natural moisture intact throughout the entire cooking process, producing a result that a conventional radiant-heat toaster physically cannot replicate regardless of setting
  • Five texture preferences represent a level of breakfast-specific precision that the rest of the toaster category has never thought necessary, and the difference between Fluffy and Crisp is not cosmetic

What we dislike

  • One slice per cycle makes this a slow proposition for households cooking breakfast for more than one person at a time, and there is no workaround built in
  • The deliberately retro veneer-brown exterior is a confident aesthetic choice that will sit naturally in some kitchens and at odds with others

4. Oblica Card Holder

Business card holders tend to fall into two categories: the forgettable and the overwrought. The Oblica, handmade in Kyoto by Sudaku, belongs to neither. Its defining characteristic is a diagonal profile that positions it inside the breast pocket of a blazer so convincingly that it reads from the outside as a folded pocket square. That is not a secondary benefit – it is the entire brief the designers set themselves. An accessory that disappears into a well-dressed person’s silhouette is a more demanding design problem than any object built to be noticed, and Sudaku approached it accordingly.

Inside, the Oblica holds more than thirty business cards and allows you to select the card you need rather than separating a single compressed stack with your thumb. The handmade construction from Kyoto communicates in the hand before it communicates to the eye, in the way materials meet each other and in the precision with which the diagonal holds its geometry under daily use. In a category saturated with objects that announce themselves, the Oblica does the opposite. It performs its function without drawing attention to the fact that it is performing a function, which is the oldest and most demanding principle in Japanese craft.

Click Here to Buy Now: $160

What we like

  • The diagonal profile reads convincingly as a folded pocket square from outside a blazer breast pocket, making this the only card holder that genuinely integrates into formalwear rather than sitting alongside it as an accessory
  • Handmade in Kyoto, with a construction quality that communicates itself in the hand before any visual inspection confirms it

What we dislike

  • At $160, this positions itself firmly as a long-term considered purchase rather than a casual utility item someone picks up without weighing the decision
  • The diagonal format is designed with a specific context in mind – a jacket or blazer breast pocket – and feels less resolved when carried any other way

5. Corcelain Modular Porcelain Cups

Designer Kosuke Takahashi arrived at 224 Porcelain’s studio in Ureshino City, Saga Prefecture, carrying a question the ceramics world hadn’t thought to ask: what if a cup was a platform rather than a finished object? The result is Corcelain, the first modular porcelain system, where each vessel – made in the Hizen-Yoshidayaki tradition that stretches through centuries of the region’s tea culture and meticulous clay work – accepts 3D-printed attachments through a precision mounting system built directly into the ceramic surface during production. Feet, handles, lids, and decorative elements attach, detach, and evolve with whoever is using them.

The implications are quieter than the concept initially suggests. These cups don’t accumulate the way most tableware does. When preferences or needs shift, you download a new component from MakerWorld, print it, and swap it in – the ceramic underneath remains unchanged. 224 Porcelain was founded by ceramist Satoshi Tsuji in 2012, and operates in a region where porcelain has been refined across generations of deliberate practice. Takahashi brought digital fabrication into a conversation that craft had been having with itself for centuries. The system that emerged produces a cup that changes alongside the person drinking from it, which no other tableware on the market currently attempts.

What we like

  • Open-source attachments available through MakerWorld mean the design continues to evolve long after purchase without requiring the ceramic base to be replaced or discarded
  • The Hizen-Yoshidayaki tradition from Saga Prefecture grounds a genuinely forward-looking modular concept in centuries of regional craft that gives the porcelain itself real weight and credibility

What we dislike

  • Full modularity requires access to a 3D printer or a printing service to realize, which limits the full experience for those who cannot easily produce their own components
  • The precision mounting points are engineered to close tolerance and require careful handling to prevent wear from frequent component changes, particularly for anyone who rotates configurations regularly

6. Kuroi Hana Knife Collection

Every Kuroi Hana blade begins with AUS-10 steel sourced from Aichi Steel Corporation, selected specifically for its combination of toughness, sharpness, and corrosion resistance at a hardness rating of 58 to 60 HRC. Sixty-seven layers of high-carbon steel build the Damascus structure that defines the collection both visually and in performance. Then the artisan submerges each blade into an etching solution that penetrates those layered surfaces and draws the pattern outward – a dark, floral form that emerges from within the steel rather than being printed or applied to its exterior. Kuroi Hana translates to black flower. The name earns its keep from the first blade you hold.

Because the etching process is carried out entirely by hand and each blade’s internal layered structure is unique, no two knives in the collection share the same pattern. The kitchen has accumulated a significant number of beautiful Japanese-influenced knives over the past decade, many of them built on borrowed visual language without the material substance underneath to justify the aesthetic. The Kuroi Hana knives don’t borrow. The Damascus etching process and the AUS-10 steel specification are the real thing, and the distinction shows the moment a blade meets a board. A knife worth picking up before you’ve decided what to cook changes the relationship between a cook and their kitchen in ways that are difficult to fully articulate until you’ve experienced the shift.

What we like

  • Every blade carries a dark floral Damascus pattern drawn from within the steel by hand, making each knife genuinely one of a kind rather than a variation on a manufactured aesthetic finish
  • AUS-10 steel rated at 58–60 HRC delivers professional-grade sharpness and material durability that performs as convincingly during prep as it looks mounted on a magnetic strip above the counter

What we dislike

  • The artisanal hand-etching process positions these knives at a premium investment level that places them firmly outside casual kitchen knife territory in terms of price and commitment
  • The striking dark floral aesthetic is polarizing for cooks who prefer clean, unmarked blade surfaces in a working kitchen environment, where the pattern is never quite the point

7. Sento 2 Zero-Twist Towel

Standard towels are manufactured by twisting cotton fibers into dense, tightly wound loops – a production method built around throughput and cost, not around the quality of what gets produced. The Sento 2 takes the opposite approach. Through zero-twist manufacturing techniques developed and refined in Japan, the natural cotton fibers are left entirely loose and uncompressed, producing a towel that is measurably softer, more absorbent, and faster-drying than anything made through the conventional looped method. The process is slower and more demanding on the production side. Every bit of that consideration is apparent on first contact.

Zero-twist cotton in this state feels fundamentally unlike mass-produced terry cloth in a way that becomes obvious within the first few seconds of use. Light enough in the hand to feel like almost nothing, absorbent enough that the task is finished before the body is consciously aware of having started it. There is a quality to the whole experience that resists adequate description and is immediately apparent in practice. It is a towel, and it is also a quiet argument for buying fewer things, choosing them with real intention, and understanding that the finest version of an everyday object repays the investment in ways that accumulate over time rather than arriving all at once.

What we like

  • Zero-twist construction produces a softness and absorbency level that conventional terry cloth cannot replicate – the difference registers immediately on first use rather than after a break-in period of repeated washes
  • The quick-drying design makes this a legitimate daily-use towel rather than a shelf-display luxury that performs better as a photograph than it does after a shower

What we dislike

  • Zero-twist fibers are inherently more delicate than tightly looped terry cloth and require more attentive laundering to preserve their structure and softness across many repeated washing cycles
  • The premium construction comes at a price that compounds meaningfully when buying multiples to properly outfit a full bathroom rather than a single hook on the back of a door

Japan Has Always Known When to Stop

Japanese design keeps returning to the same place regardless of the category it enters. It asks what the object needs to do, removes everything that fails to serve that function, and applies the best available material and craft to what remains. These seven products come from kitchens, lamp studios, razor manufacturers, ceramics workshops, and Kyoto ateliers. The category changes with each one. The underlying philosophy is identical across all of them – and it is not fashionable restraint, which is performed. It is earned restraint, which is a different thing entirely.

What each of these objects asks of the person buying it is not admiration but use. A knife that changes a cook’s relationship to the board, a lamp that adjusts its character as the day does, a towel that transforms an experience done without thinking every morning. August 2026 has been a strong month for objects built this way. The evidence is in the products themselves – each one quietly demonstrating that restraint and ambition are not opposites, only differently expressed, and that the most considered design rarely needs to raise its voice to make itself heard.

The post 7 Best Japanese Designs of August 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

This $549 QWERTY Android Phone Was Built to Give You Your Day Back

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Smartphones have never been smarter, but they’ve also never been more demanding. Bigger screens, algorithmic feeds, and relentless notifications aren’t design oversights. They’re deliberate, built to keep you engaged for as long as possible. The prevailing logic is that longer screen time is better, and most phones are optimized around that, pulling you back in every time you try to put them down.

The Minimal Phone 2 is a different kind of proposition. It’s a modern 5G Android phone built around the opposite idea: that a phone should serve you and then get out of the way. It pairs a compact AMOLED display with a full physical QWERTY keyboard and a custom OS called Minimal OS, designed to make daily interactions faster, more deliberate, and less compulsive.

Designer: Armen Youssefian

Click here to Buy Now: $599 $699 ($100 off). Hurry, only 657/1000 left! Raised over $1,009,000.

The keyboard is the phone’s most striking feature, and also its most considered. It’s a full QWERTY board integrated directly into the phone, about 69mm wide, with backlit keys whose legends are laser-etched into the keycap surface rather than printed on top, so they won’t fade with use. Each row fans outward slightly, and the keycaps are sculpted to guide your thumbs naturally.

What a physical keyboard really changes is the relationship between picking up your phone and doing something on it. When the keyboard is always there, typing becomes the default instinct instead of scrolling. You reach for the phone with something in mind, do it, and put it down. That shift sounds subtle, but over the course of a day, it changes how the device feels.

Minimal OS reinforces that instinct with its command bar, which lets you do most things without opening an app at all. Start with a symbol, type what you want, and the OS handles the rest. Typing “@jason on my way” sends a text. Typing “#lauren” places a call. A hyphen adds a to-do, an asterisk creates a calendar event, and an exclamation mark saves a note.

Communication is pulled together in something called the Minimal Hub. Swipe right from the home screen, and you get a single, unified list of everything that’s come in: emails from every account, texts, missed calls, voicemails, and calendar invitations. You can read and reply without opening a separate app, which makes a full inbox feel like clearing a short list rather than bouncing between five different places.

Two quieter features round out the software side. The Activity Bar puts 24 dots on the home screen, one per hour. Each turns white when your time stays focused, and red when the hour slips into social apps or media. The notification LED lets you assign colors and patterns to specific contacts and apps, so a glance at your desk tells you what’s actually waiting.

The hardware underneath makes it a credible daily driver. A 3.92-inch AMOLED at 1080×1240 pixels and 90Hz, a MediaTek Dimensity 8300 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB or 512GB of storage make up the core. Connectivity covers 5G, Wi-Fi 6E, and NFC. The rear camera is 50MP, the front has a 20MP shooter, and there’s both 27W wired and 15W wireless charging, as well as a 3.5mm headphone jack.

The phone sits in an aluminum frame measuring 122.6mm x 72mm x 9.48mm, in three finishes. Pearl is a brushed light alloy in a warm off-white. Onyx is an anodized alloy in a deep near-black. Ember is an anodized minimal orange, offered as a launch exclusive. The design language is restrained throughout, with nothing calling for attention except the keyboard, which announces itself plainly.

What’s interesting about the Minimal Phone 2 is that its restraint doesn’t feel punishing. It still runs full Android, so banking apps, navigation, music, and messaging are all there. What changes is how you arrive at them. Rather than a phone that sprawls into your day uninvited, this one waits to be needed, which in a landscape of devices competing for attention, feels unusual.

Click here to Buy Now: $599 $699 ($100 off). Hurry, only 657/1000 left! Raised over $1,009,000.

The post This $549 QWERTY Android Phone Was Built to Give You Your Day Back first appeared on Yanko Design.

A Designer Curled a Single Sheet of Aluminum Like Paper to Make a Grater That Fits Perfectly in Your Palm

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Most graters are a negotiation. The box grater comes out, takes up half the counter, threatens your knuckles on every pass, and goes back in the cabinet the moment you are done. The result is a tool that earns its reputation for being more trouble than it should be. This palm-sized aluminum grater starts from a different premise entirely, one where the object fits the hand that is actually doing the work, rather than the other way around.

The design takes its form from a piece of paper curling at the corner, and that shape is doing more than looking interesting. Held in the palm, the curve keeps fingers clear of the grating surface, controls the angle naturally without you having to think about it, and makes the whole act of grating something you might actually offer to a guest rather than hide in the back of a drawer. It comes in a range of colors lively enough to leave on the counter without apology.

Click Here to Buy Now: $25.00

A Grater That Fits the Hand It Works With

The ergonomics here are not incidental. The curled profile positions the grating surface at an angle the palm controls without adjusting, which means less effort per stroke and more even results across cheese, vegetables, and anything else you run across it. The form also creates a natural guard between fingers and the grating teeth, which removes the usual tension from the process. Grating stops being something you do carefully and becomes something you do quickly, cleanly, and without thinking twice about it.

One Plate. No Assembly.

Stamped from a single aluminum alloy plate, the grater has no joints to loosen, no separate parts to track, and no assembly required before or after use. Rinse it, dry it, put it down. The construction keeps it light enough that it disappears into a bag or a drawer and honest enough that it does not pretend to be more than it is. A single well-made surface that does one thing consistently well is a more useful kitchen object than a multi-function tool that hedges every task.

What We Like

  • Palm-fit ergonomics: the curled form positions the grating surface naturally in the hand, keeps fingers clear of the teeth, and removes the usual caution from the process without any adjustment required
  • Single-piece aluminum construction: no joints, no parts to lose, no reassembly after washing. The simplicity of the build is the point, and it makes the tool genuinely easier to maintain
  • Color range: available in options lively enough that leaving this on the counter is a reasonable choice, which is not something most kitchen graters can claim

What We Dislike

  • Single grating coarseness: one surface means no adjustment between a fine dusting and a coarser grate. Useful for most tasks, but not for a kitchen that needs both regularly
  • Volume ceiling: the palm-sized format is ideal for finishing and garnishing. For grating in quantity, it will take more passes and more time than a larger tool

The Kitchen Object That Earns the Counter

The best kitchen tools are the ones that stay out. Not because there is nowhere to put them, but because putting them away feels like the wrong decision. This grater earns that position through a combination of form, color, and a construction clean enough that it looks as considered as anything else on the counter.

Whether it is finishing a pasta dish, dusting a salad, or handing it to a guest who wants to do the honors themselves, it handles the task without making anything of it. That is exactly the kind of object a well-run kitchen benefits from having within reach.

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The Pixel 11’s Coolest New Feature Is Actually 10 Years Old

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The Pixel 11 lineup arrived this week with a genuinely great redesign. The camera bar is 40 percent thinner, the glass runs edge to edge, and for the first time in a while a Pixel actually looks like it evolved instead of just got a new coat of paint. And then there’s HiLight, the one piece of new hardware Google actually wants you to talk about. A small LED cluster tucked into the corner of that same camera bar, ready to glow when Gemini is thinking or when someone you love is calling.

It is, in essence, Google finally admitting it missed the old Nexus notification LED and bringing it back. Five colors, a glow for Gemini, a glow for your favorite caller, and that’s the whole feature list on day one. Nothing to complain about here, except that Nothing exists. The London phone brand has spent years turning its own version of this idea into an actual playground, mini-games, custom widgets, an SDK anyone can build on. Google clearly has the engineering muscle to do something just as ambitious with HiLight down the line. It just chose not to, at least not yet.

Designer: Google

Before we get into that though, credit where it’s due. Hold a Pixel 11 next to a Pixel 10 and the difference is immediate, not the kind that only shows up in marketing photos. The bar sits almost flush now, and Google’s claim that it’s basically bumpless with a case on actually checks out in person. Under that glass, Tensor G6 lands on a 2nm node, Google’s first, promising 25 percent faster browsing, 15 percent quicker app launches, and on-device AI running up to 3.5 times faster while using less power. The Pixel 11 gets a new 48MP main sensor with 56 percent more light sensitivity and a telephoto stretching to 30x Super Zoom. This is a very complete phone before you even get to the Pro models.

The Pro and Pro XL push further with a 50MP main sensor, a redesigned 48MP telephoto, Portrait Mode at 5x, and 120x Pro Zoom, sitting under a 3,600-nit display that Google claims is twice as scratch resistant as last year’s. Titan M3 adds quantum-safe boot security on top. The Pixel 11 Pro Fold deserves its own mention here too. It shed almost 10 percent of its weight and a millimeter of thickness, down to 10.1mm closed, while Google claims triple the durability thanks to a redesigned gearless hinge. The crease is genuinely harder to spot than last year’s, and the whole thing folds flat enough to stop feeling like a novelty. If you told me a year ago Google would have the most convincing foldable in its own lineup, I would not have believed you.

Now, the part everyone will bring up regardless of how the rest of this goes: RAM. The Pro and Pro XL start at 12GB in their base 256GB configs, down from 16GB last year, and Google is blaming this on a supplier RAM shortage hitting the entire industry. Memory manufacturers have been shifting production capacity toward AI server chips, and consumer RAM and NAND prices have spiked hard enough this year that people are half-jokingly calling it RAMageddon. It is a real problem, and Google is far from the only phone maker feeling it. Storage doubling to 256GB as a base softens the blow a little, but a $100 price bump alongside a RAM cut is still a hard sell. Fair enough on the supply chain excuse. Less fair asking Pro buyers to pay more for less unless they climb a storage tier.

Back to HiLight, because it deserves the real estate. That LED cluster sits right where the temperature sensor used to live on older Pixels, which is a strange trade to make for something this limited. Google’s official pitch is that HiLight keeps you informed without the distraction of staring at a screen, which is a very polished way of saying there weren’t enough ideas to fill the space. Glowing when Gemini talks and flashing a color for favorite callers is a fine start, not an entire feature. Compare that to what’s happening across the pond. Nothing’s Glyph Matrix on the Phone (3) packs 489 individually lit LEDs into what functions as a tiny secondary screen, complete with an open SDK that lets anyone build their own widgets and games. People made a working ball maze. A tilt-controlled Magic 8 Ball. A contact dialer you can use without touching the main display. None of it is essential, but all of it is fun, and fun counts for something when you’re asking someone to pay a premium for a light.

Google clearly has the horsepower for something bigger here. Tensor G6 alone proves the company isn’t short on engineering muscle, and the camera bar redesign shows the industrial design team knows exactly what it’s doing right now. HiLight feels like the output of a team that had a great idea, then stopped one meeting short of making it good. I want to see where this goes in a year or two, because the foundation Google just built, the hardware, the placement, even the name, is genuinely solid. It just needs an actual reason to exist beyond telling you Gemini is thinking.

 

The post The Pixel 11’s Coolest New Feature Is Actually 10 Years Old first appeared on Yanko Design.

Google’s Pixel Tag is making the same ‘boring’ design mistake that Apple, Samsung, and Xiaomi made

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The Pixel Tag comes in exactly one color, a grey green called Fog, wrapped around stainless steel with a G logo stamped right on the front. It’s the same script Apple wrote with the AirTag and Samsung copied with the SmartTag2. A tracker spends its entire life clipped to your keys or your dog’s collar or tucked into a backpack pocket, which makes it one of the most personal objects you own. Google, of all companies, knows how to make hardware feel less like hardware. It just didn’t bother here.

Somebody at DJI figured out that a $60 microphone could come with snap-on decals, because apparently even a tiny accessory deserves a little personality. Motorola figured out something similar with the Moto Tag, which actually ships in sage green and a soft blue instead of the usual black or white default. So it’s not like nobody in tech has thought about this. It’s just that almost nobody applies it to trackers, and now Google has joined the long list of companies that had the chance and passed.

Designer: Google

The excuse I keep hearing, and I use that word deliberately, is durability. Metal survives drops, fabric doesn’t, case closed. Except my phone survives daily abuse inside a woven case, and so does yours, and so does every rugged Kevlar sleeve sold by the millions for devices far more fragile than a coin sized tracker. Nobody worries their phone case is going to disintegrate because it has some texture on it. A tracker being too delicate for color or grip is not a real constraint. It’s a decision that got dressed up as one.

Underneath that decision is genuinely solid engineering, for what it’s worth. The Pixel Tag measures 1.8 by 1.1 inches and just 5.4mm thick, which makes it noticeably slimmer than the AirTag’s 8mm body. It runs on a replaceable CR2032 battery rated for about a year, carries an IP67 rating for dust and water, and pairs instantly over Fast Pair with any Android 9 device or newer. The headline feature is Ultra Wideband combined with Bluetooth Channel Sounding, which gives you a literal on-screen arrow and distance reading instead of a vague “getting warmer” signal, though that trick needs Android 16 and Bluetooth 6.0 to actually work. It taps into Find Hub, Google’s network of over a billion Android phones, so a lost item can get spotted even when it is nowhere near your own devices. You can share access with up to ten people, ring it from a Pixel Watch, or ask Gemini through your Pixel Buds to ring it for you. All of that ships November 11 for $29, or $99 for a four pack.

Google already knows how to wrap good engineering in an object people actually want to look at, because it solved the exact same brief years ago with its speakers. The Nest Mini gets a soft, woven top because Google understood people don’t want to display a hunk of bare plastic on their kitchen counter. The Nest Audio does the same thing, fabric front, rounded edges, an object designed to belong in a room rather than announce itself as a gadget in one. That instinct exists inside the same company that just shipped a keychain accessory in one shade of grey with a logo dead center, like it needed to remind you it’s tech.

A tracker’s entire job is to sit quietly on the stuff you actually care about. It should feel like something you chose, not something you tolerated because the tech underneath happened to be good. Find Hub integration, UWB precision finding, a battery that lasts a year, all of that is genuinely solid work. But solid engineering wrapped in a logo stamped on steel isn’t a finished product. It’s half of one, and Google, weirdly, is the company with the least excuse for stopping there.

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