Tag Archives: Product Design

MAKERphone 2.0 Assembles Like LEGO, Calls Like a Real 4G Phone

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Most phones arrive finished, sealed behind glass before you open the box. MAKERphone 2.0 flips that script. It ships as loose parts that only become a phone once you build it yourself: no soldering iron, no electronics background, just a screwdriver and about two hours. Once assembled, it’s a working 4G device that makes real calls and sends texts over a live network.

The build is what really sells the design. Every piece, from the board to the display to the numpad and to the joystick, clicks or screws into place. The entire endeavor is guided by an illustrated manual that reads like a LEGO instruction booklet, with video walkthroughs for anyone who gets stuck. By the time you finish, you’ve seen the processor, the modem, and the battery close, not used them.

Designer: CircuitMess

Click Here to Buy Now: $129 $160 (24% off). Hurry, only a few left! Raised over $300,000.

Pop in a nano-SIM and the phone comes alive on 4G networks, handling calls and texts like any device off a shelf. There’s a music player, a photo and video gallery, a calendar, notes, and a handful of retro games loaded onto that small color screen. What’s missing says as much: no app store, no social feed, nothing designed to keep anyone scrolling past bedtime.

That absence is the whole appeal for anyone shopping for a kid’s first phone. It calls and texts the people a child needs to reach, without opening the door to an internet’s worth of distraction. When a kid wants a new app or game, the answer isn’t downloading one; it’s building it. Screen time stops being something to limit and starts being something to spend making.

That building happens inside VibeBoy, the phone’s companion coding studio that runs on a computer. Describe an idea in plain English, like a taco dodging falling pickles, and the AI writes code sent to the phone with one click. The goal isn’t to let AI do all the thinking but to let VibeBoy teach users to read that code, question it, and eventually rewrite it.

That teaching happens across four stages built into the same app. Beginners describe what they want and watch it appear on-screen, before moving on to reading and tweaking the Python code the AI generates. Eventually, they write their own Python and C++ from a blank file. Nobody stays at one skill level long; the ladder is designed so most people climb it faster than expected.

Six snap-on modules turn the phone into something closer to a small hardware platform than a single-purpose device. A camera module captures pixelated stills and video, a bigger speaker adds volume, and a flashlight adds utility. An environment sensor reads temperature and humidity, an infrared module controls other devices, and a bare perforated board lets anyone solder a custom circuit and plug it in.

A companion smartwatch called MAKERband follows the same idea, arriving as a kit to assemble rather than a sealed gadget. Once built, it pairs with the phone over Bluetooth and also works with iOS and Android, running 15 watchfaces and five mini-games out of the box. It connects to VibeBoy, so a custom watchface, say, a pixel cat that naps after 9 PM, is a prompt away.

The company behind it, CircuitMess, has spent years building kits like this from a small studio in Croatia. It has shipped hundreds of thousands of units to customers across more than 100 countries, developed dozens of products, and earned coverage from outlets like Wired and The Verge. Just as important, the MAKERphone 2.0 isn’t a rendering or an early prototype: the hardware is finished and ready for production.

What sticks with you isn’t any single spec but the sequence. A pile of components turns into a working phone, and that phone turns into whatever its owner decides to code next. Somewhere between the last screw and the first successful call, the device stops feeling like something you bought and starts feeling like something you actually built, one working call at a time.

Click Here to Buy Now: $129 $160 (24% off). Hurry, only a few left! Raised over $300,000.

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This Lounge Chair Is Built From Cork — and It’s Sturdier Than It Looks

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Cork is everywhere in design, and yet it’s almost always decorative. A tile floor. A pin board. A wine stopper. Copenhagen-based furniture designer Chiara Verde looked at that assumption and quietly dismantled it. Her Strata lounge chair doesn’t use cork as a finish — it uses cork as the architecture.

The chair is built around a layered composite system: thin cork sheets alternated with natural fibre textiles, laminated together to form load-bearing shells. The textile reinforcement isn’t there for aesthetics — it gives the cork directional stiffness and structural performance it simply doesn’t have on its own. A minimal metal frame handles only the points under concentrated load, leaving the cork shells to carry the rest. It reads, visually, like a chair slung from material intelligence rather than convention.

Designer: Chiara Verde

Verde’s background leans heavily into process. Her practice is built on material experimentation, prototyping, and structural research — work that treats the studio bench as an extension of the design itself. Strata wasn’t conceived and then executed. It emerged through months of testing, adjustment, failure, and recalibration. A cork stool came first — a full-scale testbed that validated the structural logic before Verde committed it to a larger form. The lounge chair is the result of everything that came before it.

What makes Strata worth paying attention to isn’t just the material provocation — it’s how restrained the final form is. The chair doesn’t announce itself. It holds the visual language of the natural world: organic in silhouette, warm in texture, quietly confident in its proportions. Cork has an inherent thermal quality to it, a softness underfoot and underhand that synthetic materials spend millions trying to replicate. Here, it’s simply doing its job.

The lineage of the slung chair runs deep — leather over steel tubing defined a generation of modernist seating in the early and mid-20th century. Verde is working in that same formal territory, proposing laminated cork as the next honest alternative to leather: a material that gives, breathes, and ages with use rather than against it.

Strata sits in a growing conversation around material-led design — not sustainability as branding, but sustainability as methodology. Verde isn’t marketing cork. She’s interrogating it, and the chair is the proof of concept. For a material that has spent decades on the periphery of furniture design, Strata might be the argument it needed all along.

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Gorgeous LEGO Book Nook Has a Steam Train Blasting Straight Through Its Snowy Pages

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Every kid who grew up with Chris Van Allsburg’s The Polar Express remembers that moment where the story stops behaving like a story. A train just shows up, chugging straight out of the snow and into a kid’s actual bedroom, and suddenly bedtime reading feels a little bit dangerous in the best way. That’s the exact energy LEGO builder CrazyInventor is chasing with Winter Express, and yes, I see what you did there with that title, very smart way to dodge a certain mouse-shaped legal team while still getting the reference across loud and clear. Except here the train doesn’t stop at bursting out of the pages. It runs straight through the whole book, cover to cover, like the story just wasn’t big enough to hold it.

The result looks like someone left a hardback open on a shelf and a Victorian steam engine decided to use it as a shortcut. Gold trim, a red ribbon bookmark, snow dusted across the back cover like a sky full of stars, this thing reads more like a diorama that happens to be shaped like a book than a book that happens to have a train in it. And once you spot the tiny second train hiding inside the pages, you’ll understand why this project cracked 1,000 supporters in about three days flat.

Designer: CrazyInventor

The book itself steals the show before the train even enters the conversation. It’s a navy blue hardback with rounded gold corner guards and matching gold bands running down a curved spine, the kind of cover treatment you’d expect on a leather-bound classic rather than a pile of ABS plastic. A gold plaque on the front reads “Winter Express” in a wood-grain frame, and a red ribbon bookmark hangs off the top edge like someone set the book down mid-chapter and wandered off to make tea. Flip to the back cover and it’s scattered with pale blue round studs, doing double duty as either falling snow or a starry winter sky, depending on how you’re feeling that day.

A black and gold Victorian locomotive takes over from there, complete with a glowing headlamp, a cowcatcher up front, and Technic side rod detailing, coming straight out of a snow-capped rock tunnel carved into the front cover. A matching passenger coach trails out the other side through the spine, decked out in scrollwork trim with its own lit lanterns and a roof stacked with skis and sleds. Snowy pine trees, cobblestone tiles, and two working lampposts fill out the base, along with a frozen little pond built from trans-blue tiles.

My favorite detail is buried in the pages themselves. Look closely at the tan interior spread and there are cutout windows revealing a second, micro-scale train crossing a tiny stone viaduct, a whole miniature railway hiding inside the book that the big train is currently smashing its way through. It’s a small touch, but it’s the kind of layered thinking that separates a fun MOC from a genuinely great one.

Winter Express landed on LEGO Ideas on September 15 and has already pulled in 1,291 supporters, cruising well past the first 1,000-vote milestone toward the 5,000 mark it needs next. If cozy winter dioramas with a little bit of chaos baked in are your thing, go to the LEGO Ideas page and add your support and watch this one keep climbing.

The post Gorgeous LEGO Book Nook Has a Steam Train Blasting Straight Through Its Snowy Pages first appeared on Yanko Design.

9 Retro Audio Gadgets Bringing Cassettes and CDs Back From the Dead

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Streaming gave us convenience and took away everything else. No album art worth holding, no ritual of pressing play, no object that tells you something about the person who assembled it. The cassette and the compact disc never fully disappeared, but they got buried under playlists, autoplay, and whatever the algorithm decided you needed to hear next. These nine gadgets are the corrective — physical media products designed better than the originals, for a generation that has decided passive listening isn’t enough.

What’s striking about this particular wave of retro audio hardware isn’t the nostalgia. It’s the execution. Transparent housings that show mechanisms in motion. Bluetooth built into bodies shaped like tape decks. CD players that double as wall art. These aren’t reproductions of old technology. They’re new objects built around old formats, each one making a specific argument for why holding your music matters more now than it did when these formats first appeared. Here are nine that make the case best.

1. Portable CD Cover Player

The Portable CD Cover Player does something no streaming service can: it lets you hold the music. The disc slots in, the jacket slides alongside it, and the album art isn’t something you glance at between phone notifications. It’s front and center, the way it was designed to be. Available in white and black, the player is minimal to the point of restraint — shaped around the ritual of putting on a record rather than around a feature list.

It earns its place at the top of this list because it makes the strongest possible case for physical media without leaning on nostalgia as a crutch. The two-tone color option means it works across more rooms and more shelves than it might first suggest. There’s no gimmick here. Just a player that understands the object it was built around and was designed directly for it.

Click Here to Buy Now: $199.00

What we like:

  • The jacket slot makes album art a central part of the listening experience, not a side effect of owning a disc
  • Two color options and a restrained silhouette give it genuine shelf versatility across different interiors

What we dislike:

  • At $199, it’s a considered purchase, not an impulse one, which narrows the audience considerably
  • No Bluetooth output means committing to wired listening or pairing with a standalone speaker

2. We Are Rewind GB-001 Boombox

The GB-001 is a proper boombox in the original sense of the word — something you carry by its full-width folding handle and set down in a room that then belongs to the music. Four hi-fi speakers, two Class D woofer amplifiers, and two tweeters push 104 watts across a frequency response of 40 to 20,000Hz. The cassette deck plays and records. A guitar amp input takes a real guitar. These are functional commitments, not features added to round out a marketing page.

Backlit VU meters that are functional and warm rather than decorative set the tone for what the GB-001 is trying to be. Bluetooth 5.4 handles streaming when the tapes run out, and a 3,000mAh battery delivers up to 10 hours of playback on tape and speaker. At 19 inches wide and 15 pounds, it’s not designed for a bag. It was never trying to be. The GB-001 is what happens when a company commits to the full premise of a format rather than borrowing only its aesthetic.

What we like:

  • 104 watts, a working cassette deck, and a guitar amp input make this real audio equipment, not a novelty
  • Backlit VU meters that are functional and warm, not decorative afterthoughts

What we dislike:

  • 15 pounds means portability is more of an idea than a daily practice
  • The price positions it as a premium audio purchase, which is the right call but limits the audience

3. FiiO CP13

The FiiO CP13 is built around one decision that every other modern cassette player quietly avoids: no Bluetooth. The signal runs straight from the magnetic tape head, through a JRC5532 op-amp, and out the 3.5mm jack with no digital conversion anywhere in the chain. It supports Type I through Type IV tape formats, covering virtually every cassette most collections contain. The result is a player that treats the format as the point, not as packaging around a wireless speaker dressed up in retro styling.

An 1800mAh lithium cobalt oxide battery delivers 13 hours of playback and charges via USB-C, which means the hardware is modern even when the philosophy isn’t. The transparent body shows the mechanism running, which is the correct decision at any price — analog gear earns its keep when you can see it working. At $87.99, the CP13 is the most affordable commitment to doing cassette properly on this list, and that makes it the clearest first recommendation for a buyer who wants the format done right rather than done cute.

What we like:

  • A true all-analog signal path from tape head to 3.5mm output — no digital conversion, no compromise anywhere in the chain
  • 13 hours of playback charged via USB-C makes it practical as well as principled

What we dislike:

  • No Bluetooth means a wired setup is required in a world that has largely moved on from cables
  • The transparent body shows every fingerprint, which is a minor but persistent irritation for something this tactile

4. Side A Cassette Speaker

The Side A Cassette Speaker costs $49, weighs 80 grams, and is the most immediately photographable thing on this list. The transparent shell, the Side A label, the dimensions that match a real tape — it reads as a cassette the moment you see it. Inside, it’s a Bluetooth 5.3 speaker with microSD playback and a sound profile tuned to echo the warm character of analog tape. It’s the entry point that makes no apologies for what it is: a very good-looking, very affordable reason to engage with this category.

The clear case converts into a display stand, giving the speaker a second life as a shelf object between listening sessions. It’s the only product on this list that functions as décor without trying too hard. The honest caveat: this is a speaker shaped like a cassette, not an actual cassette player. That distinction matters to purists and not at all to the people who will buy one, set it on a shelf, and love it without reservation. Both responses are valid. The design earns both of them.

Click Here to Buy Now: $49.00

What we like:

  • The lowest price on this list makes it the safest first step into the retro audio category
  • The clear case doubles as a display stand, useful whether you’re listening or simply decorating

What we dislike:

  • It’s a speaker shaped like a cassette, not a real player — the purist distinction is real even if it doesn’t bother everyone
  • At 80 grams, the build reflects the price point, which is fine until it becomes apparent in the hand

5. SYITREN R300 CD Player

The SYITREN R300 won a MUSE Design Gold Award in the Audio and Video Devices category, and you can see the reasoning from across a room. Clean lines, available in wood grain, white, and a fruit green that commits fully to being a statement — the R300 treats the CD player as an object with considered presence rather than just a disc-reading appliance. It supports CD, CD-R, and CD-RW formats, covering practically every disc in most collections, with Bluetooth output that connects to whatever speaker you already own.

The R300 makes a case that a CD player is worth looking at, not just using. Design award credentials at under $100 are uncommon. The fruit green finish is a choice that earns its place in any room — not a novelty colorway but a genuine aesthetic commitment. The practical limitation is that there’s no built-in speaker, so the R300 depends on a Bluetooth pairing or headphones to produce any sound. For listeners who want a single, self-contained unit, that’s a real constraint worth knowing before the purchase is made.

What we like:

  • A MUSE Design Gold Award at $89.99 is an uncommon combination of credentialed design at an accessible price
  • Three finishes, including a fruit green that functions as a genuine design statement, not a novelty option

What we dislike:

  • No built-in speaker means it requires a separate audio output to function at all
  • Three colorway options may feel limiting for listeners who want something more singular to their space

6. ClearFrame CD Player

The ClearFrame CD Player does not pretend the disc is incidental to the experience. The crystal-clear polycarbonate body frames the album as a visual object — turning the most overlooked part of CD ownership into the centerpiece. Album art, spinning disc, visible mechanism: all of it on display, exactly where it should have been all along. It’s the wall-mountable entry on this list, the one you buy when you want the music to be as visible as it is audible, and the design earns that brief completely.

The square silhouette and clear housing create an object that reads differently depending on where you put it. On a wall it functions as art. On a shelf it functions as a player. That dual reading is harder to pull off than it looks, and the ClearFrame manages it without novelty as a crutch. At $199, it is the most considered purchase in the CD category on this list, and it rewards that consideration with an object that actively improves whichever room it occupies, regardless of whether anything is playing.

Click Here to Buy Now: $200.00

What we like:

  • The clear polycarbonate body turns the spinning disc and album art into a visual display worthy of a wall
  • Reads as both art object and working CD player — a dual brief it handles without compromise

What we dislike:

  • It’s a stationary display piece first — grab-and-go listening is not what this was designed for
  • The $199 starting price requires a level of commitment that more casual listeners may not be ready to make

7. MusicFrame M1 CD Player

The MusicFrame M1 makes the same argument as the ClearFrame for $100 less, and it makes a slightly different case for why that matters. The transparent enclosure gives a full view of the player’s internal architecture. The square, geometric silhouette reads as framed art whether it’s mounted on a wall or sitting on a table. At $99 it is the most accessible entry into the CD-as-object format on this list, and it makes the case without asking for a premium before you know if the idea is for you.

The M1 is proof that the display CD player isn’t a single-brand concept. Clean geometry, a transparent body that shows the mechanism in motion, and a price point that makes a first purchase feel low-risk: these are the conditions for converting a listener who liked the idea but wasn’t ready to spend $199 finding out. The limitation is the same as the ClearFrame — this is a settled piece, not a portable one. Portability wasn’t part of the brief, and the design is sharper for that honesty.

What we like:

  • The $99 price makes the CD-as-visual-object format genuinely accessible without a significant commitment
  • The geometric silhouette and transparent casing look equally considered on a table or a wall

What we dislike:

  • Limited portability by design — it’s made to stay in one place and works best when treated that way
  • The $100 gap between this and the ClearFrame is reflected somewhere in materials and overall finish

8. NINM Lab IT’S OK TOO

NINM Lab’s IT’S OK series launched via Kickstarter in 2019 as the world’s first Bluetooth-enabled cassette player. The IT’S OK TOO is the second generation, and the upgrade is meaningful: stereo output replaces mono, Bluetooth 5.0 delivers a faster and more stable connection, and a semi-transparent matte body refines the iconic look of the original without abandoning it. The tape is visible in motion through the housing — the right decision in 2019 and still the right decision now, regardless of how many transparent cassette players have since followed.

The IT’S OK TOO operates on a one-player, two-possibilities premise. Listen privately through Bluetooth headphones or wired earphones, or share by connecting to a Bluetooth speaker. Bluetooth 5.0 handles the switching with a wider wireless range and faster transmission than the original. Inspired by the experience of cassette listening in the 1980s, it carries the format forward with enough modern infrastructure to be genuinely useful rather than simply charming. The HK$798 price adds an import step for most Western buyers, but that’s the only real friction in an otherwise considered package.

What we like:

  • The original IT’S OK was the world’s first Bluetooth cassette player — the second generation improves meaningfully with stereo output and Bluetooth 5.0
  • The dual-mode listening setup — private or shared — makes it genuinely versatile for daily use

What we dislike:

  • HK$798 pricing adds currency conversion and import friction for buyers outside Asia
  • First-generation units had documented reliability concerns from early adopters — worth watching in the second generation

9. Retrospekt CP-81 Portable Cassette Player

The Retrospekt CP-81 stopped trying to be a hi-fi device and leaned fully into being a cultural artifact, and somehow that turned out to be exactly right. The clear plastic body shows the mechanism in full. The controls are exactly where you’d expect them. The included Koss headphones with orange foam pads and a stainless-steel headband make the whole package feel like something pulled from a very specific corner of 1983. Sold at the MoMA Design Store, Nordstrom, and Urban Outfitters, the CP-81 has earned both its context and its audience.

What grounds it is that it actually works as a cassette player. The CP-81 plays, fast-forwards, rewinds, and records, with a line-in microphone jack that most modern cassette players quietly removed from the spec sheet. Power comes from two AA batteries or a USB-C input. It carries 4.8 stars across 174 reviews. Collaboration editions with Miffy, Peanuts, and Hello Kitty treat the cassette player as a canvas rather than a device. The people who buy one tend to keep it on a desk rather than in a drawer. That’s the design doing its job.

What we like:

  • Records as well as plays, with a microphone jack that most modern cassette players have quietly dropped from the spec sheet
  • Collaboration editions with Miffy, Peanuts, and Hello Kitty treat the player as a canvas — a rare thing for consumer electronics

What we dislike:

  • The clear plastic body shows every fingerprint, a recurring issue for something you’ll handle every day
  • Collaboration editions sell out quickly, and availability varies across retailers in ways that are difficult to predict

The Format Is the Feature

The cassette and the CD didn’t come back because of nostalgia. They came back because streaming made listening passive, and these formats make it physical. Every object on this list asks you to do something — pick a tape, slide in a disc, press a real button. That is not a limitation of older technology. It’s a feature that the streaming era quietly removed, and a growing number of listeners have decided they want it back in their hands, not filtered through an algorithm.

The right pick depends on what you’re after. For the most considered visual object, the ClearFrame. For the most committed analog signal path, the FiiO CP13. For the most complete boombox revival, the GB-001. For the most surprising value, the Side A Cassette Speaker at $49. For the most culturally loaded package, the Retrospekt CP-81. Nine gadgets, nine specific arguments for the same conclusion: physical media sounds better when you can actually hold it.

The post 9 Retro Audio Gadgets Bringing Cassettes and CDs Back From the Dead first appeared on Yanko Design.

Battery-free Portable Water Sprayer Solves a Problem Beaches, Campsites, and Public Restrooms All Share

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Sand is genuinely one of the most stubborn substances on earth. Anyone who’s ever come home from a beach day still gritty between their toes, despite standing under an outdoor shower for five minutes, knows the feeling. Camping does the same thing in a different register, swapping sand for mud, trail dust, and whatever else the outdoors has to offer. The core problem is always the same: you need a controlled stream of water pointed precisely where you need it, and you either have access to a tap or you very much do not. There is no middle ground in nature.

PORTALO is Karim Ali’s answer to that, and the 24-year-old French product design engineer started on it in 2022 while still in school. It’s a compact manual pressurized water sprayer, 410ml of BPA-free water in a pneumatically pressurized vessel that hits up to 3 bar through a 60cm retractable hose and a brass nozzle you can dial from a focused jet to a wide mist. It runs on pure air pressure with no battery, no motor, and no charging, meaning the space competitors devote to electronics goes straight to water capacity. The origami-inspired form docks magnetically, slings across your body, and leaves both hands free.

Designer: Karim Ali

Click Here to Buy Now: $57 $69 (17% off). Hurry, only a few left! Raised over $53,000.

Twenty-six billion wet wipes enter the environment every year, a figure that makes sense when you realize a wet wipe is the default portable hygiene solution for much of the western world. They contain preservatives and fragrances that dermatologists flag regularly, account for 94% of UK sewer blockages, and cost families roughly £58 a year in infant care alone. Karim spent four years and eleven prototypes working on one question: how do you bring that same comfort anywhere? PORTALO is a compact manual high-pressure water system for hygiene and quick cleanups anywhere, designed to deliver a pressurized jet anywhere, from a small water reserve, without electricity or disposable consumables. Karim calls it hygiene autonomy, which sounds a lot more elaborate than a ‘portable spray,’ but when you get into the details, you realize the PORTALO is, in fact, much more than just a spray.

Building pressure by hand before use, rather than routing it through a motor, is the decision that makes everything else in PORTALO possible. PORTALO is pressurized first, then delivers a continuous controlled stream through a lightweight shower head and retractable hose, with no continuous pumping, motor, or battery. Electric competitors in the same size class devote part of their interior to a lithium motor and battery, require regular charging, and still top out at 0.5 to 1.5 bar of pressure. Removing the motor and battery leaves more room for water at the same size, requires no charging, and keeps the system mechanically simple and maintainable. At 120 seconds of continuous runtime from 410ml and a body weight of just 205 grams, the numbers make a compelling case for leaving the electronics out entirely.

Most portable bidets have a public restroom problem: you’re holding and aiming the whole bottle while trying to use it, and the coordination that requires is more athletic than hygienic. PORTALO’s 60cm retractable hose separates those two tasks, letting the bottle stay beside you while only the small shower head goes where you need it, with no need to hold or turn the whole bottle upside down. That nozzle is brass, not the injection-molded plastic standard across competing products, giving it a tactile density and durability that reads as deliberate. The spray width dials between a direct jet for powerful cleaning and a mist for refreshing and gentle rinsing, with the head rotating freely in any direction. It’s the kind of setup that makes you realize how low the bar in this category has been set.

A Japanese Asanoha origami geometry shapes the PORTALO body into an angular, faceted form, paying homage to Japanese culture and its strong relationship with cleanliness – both in life and in visual design. The spray head clips magnetically to the bottle and rotates in any direction, so you can place it down, point it where you need it, and keep your hands free. Most things in this category look like they were designed to be forgotten in a toiletry bag, and PORTALO clearly was not. Sling it across your body, the nozzle docks magnetically, the strap holds it upright and ready, and both hands stay free with running water on demand. The reservoir is heavily tinted but transparent enough to read the water level at a glance without opening anything, a detail that matters most when you’re refilling in low light. PORTALO is made to be repairable and uses standard joints with a minimal amount of glue, with 90% of the product disassembling by hand.

PORTALO started in 2022 inside a student dorm, with a first prototype that was a modified garden sprayer assembled to test whether manual pressure alone could generate enough power for portable hygiene, and despite being bulky and far from the final vision, one thing became immediately clear: the pressure worked. PORTALO evolved through 11 different prototypes of simplifying before reaching the current final version, which is now patent pending internationally under the PCT. PORTALO won the Alibaba CoCreate Pitch 2025 from a field of 30,000 applicants and appeared at Concours Lépine 2026 at the Paris Fair, where the first production units were sold directly to the public. Concours Lépine, established in 1901, has over a century of rewarding practical inventions over aesthetic concepts, which is exactly the company PORTALO belongs in.

PORTALO is available in four colorways, Coal Black, Sky Blue, Olive Green, and Canyon Orange, with a microfiber carrying case and carry strap included. The retail price is €59, roughly $68 USD, with worldwide shipping and an estimated delivery of December 2026. The product is no longer a concept-stage project, having already been designed, industrialized, manufactured in a first batch, presented to the public, and sold during Concours Lépine, making this a finished design scaling for broader distribution rather than a concept hunting for its first factory run. For anyone who camps, travels, has young kids, plays outdoor sports, or has quietly accepted the portable hygiene problem as an unsolvable given, PORTALO makes a well-reasoned case otherwise. Four years, 11 prototypes, a brass nozzle, and a clever pump. Karim did the work.

Click Here to Buy Now: $57 $69 (17% off). Hurry, only a few left! Raised over $53,000.

The post Battery-free Portable Water Sprayer Solves a Problem Beaches, Campsites, and Public Restrooms All Share first appeared on Yanko Design.

UGREEN’s iPhone 18 Pro Case Packs An Extra Screen For That ‘iPhone Duo Effect’

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Don’t worry, you don’t need to spend $1999 to gift yourself an iPhone with an extra screen. UGREEN debuted what they call the “Magic E-ink Screen Case” for the iPhone 18 Pro series – a protective case that gives your 18 Pro an extra display… kind of like the Duo, but without the bleeding price tag. The case, shown in a complementary burgundy colorway, packs a 6-color E-ink display on the back, making it perfect for photos, wallpapers, notes, QR codes, or any sort of personalization you’d want. No, sadly it won’t pull off that cool frosted glass animation that made the Duo so drool-worthy!

Fresh off a successful run at IFA (with the company debuting their world’s first liquid-cooled MagSafe power bank), UGREEN decided resting was for the week. Just days after Apple’s iPhone announcement, the company took to Weibo, sharing a look at three products to complement Apple’s latest Pro-series device. The first, a 45W charging brick, second, a screen protector, and thirdly, a protective case that makes the back of your phone about as interesting as the front.

Designer: UGREEN

The case’s primary role is to serve as protection for your $1199 phone. It covers the sides with a thick bumper, packed with air-cushion corners for extra drop protection. The camera plateau gets a raised lip to shield your lenses (especially that variable aperture shooter), but the screen on the back steals the cake. UGREEN hasn’t specified its dimensions, but we do know that it’s a 6-color E-ink display that can be controlled via an app on the phone, letting you send images, wallpapers, and notes to the display with a simple button push. Once there, the e-ink screen renders the image out, keeping it there forever without any power consumption.

We don’t know whether this still lets you use wireless charging on your iPhone, my guess is that you’ll have to make that compromise, along with never being able to ever put any MagSafe accessory on the back. The benefit, however, is having a hyper-personalized smartphone case so you don’t ever confuse your device with someone else’s ever again. For the right audience, that’s a very doable trade-off.

While details remain scarce, there are two worth noting. Notebookcheck mentions that the e-ink screen won’t function as a viewfinder for the rear camera – a feature that would almost instantly turn this case into a very acceptable iPhone Duo replacement for a large group of people. It’s just photos for now, which makes sense because adding extra features would mean adding a bigger battery and more powerful processor. At that rate you might as well just pack an OLED in there along with a thick battery panel.

The second caveat is that UGREEN’s marketing the Magic E-ink Screen Case exclusively in China, with no word on a global launch. That’s probably why we didn’t see this at IFA 2026 either. I’m sure it would’ve been all the rage on the show floor!

The post UGREEN’s iPhone 18 Pro Case Packs An Extra Screen For That ‘iPhone Duo Effect’ first appeared on Yanko Design.

Pikachu Just Got Hidden Inside Your Coffee Mug, and Pokémon Fans Are Going to Lose It

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Pikachu has appeared on a lot of things over the past 30 years — Alfredo Häberli’s Origo tableware wasn’t exactly the obvious next stop. Finnish design brand Iittala has reimagined its beloved Origo tableware collection in collaboration with Pokémon, marking 30 years of the Japanese media giant with a trio of pieces that feel both nostalgic and entirely fresh. A mug, a plate, and a bowl — each one a small study in restraint meeting playfulness.

Origo is no stranger to cult status. Originally designed by Alfredo Häberli in 1999, the striped tableware has long been a fixture in Finnish homes, celebrated for its simple geometry and quiet charm. For this collaboration, Häberli returned to his own work, subtly shifting the collection’s signature stripes into a warm palette of yellow, red, and brown — tones drawn directly from Pikachu, Pokémon’s most recognisable character. The result doesn’t shout. It earns its second glance.

Designer: Iittala & Pokémon

That restraint extends to how Pikachu appears across the pieces. Black and white illustrations are tucked onto the insides of the mug, plate, and bowl, as well as their bases — small discoveries rather than declarations. “Pikachu is almost ‘adventuring’ across the collection, adding a layer of surprise and charm,” said Janni Vepsäläinen, Iittala’s creative director, who joined the brand in 2023 after a tenure at JW Anderson.

Vepsäläinen was candid about the unexpected nature of the pairing. “At first glance, Iittala and Pokémon might seem like an unlikely match, two worlds that don’t obviously touch,” she said. “But that quiet friction is exactly what drew us in.” It’s the kind of creative logic that tends to produce the most interesting work — not two brands that naturally overlap, but two identities whose contrast makes the collaboration worth paying attention to.

The emotional hook is the 1990s. Both Origo and Pokémon were born in that decade, and the collaboration leans into that shared origin with intention. “Design culture from that era continues to feel relevant today — timeless products that still spark joy,” Vepsäläinen noted. It’s a sentiment that holds. There’s a reason Origo never left Finnish kitchen tables, and a reason Pikachu never needed a rebrand.

What Iittala has done here is resist the temptation to over-design the moment. The Pikachu Origo collection doesn’t try to be a statement. It simply invites a little joy into the everyday — a flash of yellow on the breakfast table, a small illustration at the bottom of your coffee cup. As Vepsäläinen put it, “Pikachu brings happiness across generations.” On the evidence of these pieces, it’s hard to argue otherwise.

The post Pikachu Just Got Hidden Inside Your Coffee Mug, and Pokémon Fans Are Going to Lose It first appeared on Yanko Design.

The 5 Best Outdoor Gear of September 2026

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September is where outdoor gear earns its reputation. The crowds thin, the trails go quiet, and what you carry starts to matter in ways summer rarely tests. This month’s roundup brings together five products that solve real, specific problems without padding your pack. From a Damascus steel knife engineering two independent sliders into a 0.6-inch body to a heated compression sack that pre-warms your sleeping bag, each pick here was chosen because it earns its weight.

None of these products are filling a trend cycle. Each one solves something that already bothered someone enough to design a better version. The price range is wide by design, from a $39 Kickstarter EDC knife to a $287 camp heater, because good gear is not always expensive and expensive gear is not always good. What connects everything on this list is the same thing: a refusal to treat function and design as separate conversations.

1. LUNARK Edge & Pop Dual

Most pocket knives pick a lane. The LUNARK Edge & Pop Dual doesn’t. Built from 27 individual parts compressed into a 0.6-inch body, it fits two independent sliding mechanisms into a frame most tools would reserve for a single blade. One slider deploys a 67-layer Damascus steel drop-point blade with a 9Cr18MoV core, rated 58 to 60 HRC. The other releases a dedicated bottle opener on its own thumb control. Neither mechanism touches the other.

The Dual weighs 2.5 ounces and measures 3.1 inches open, sitting flat in a pocket without announcing itself. The heat-treated 420 stainless steel frame comes finished in Ebony or Golden Sandalwood, and when you close both sliders, the body converts into a phone stand holding devices up to 8mm thick, flat or upright, without needing a third control to engage it. Three functions live inside the geometry of one tool you were already going to carry.

What We Like

  • Two independent sliders for the blade and bottle opener, each on its own thumb control, so neither mechanism requires the other to move
  • Closing both sliders activates a built-in phone stand that holds devices up to 8mm thick, adding a third function without any extra footprint

What We Dislike

  • The phone stand has an 8mm device thickness limit, meaning cases on the thicker side may not be supported

2. BlackoutBeam Tactical Flashlight

The BlackoutBeam makes a clear statement about what it does. With 2,300 lumens and a 300-meter beam throw, it outperforms most tactical flashlights twice its size. The number worth paying attention to is the 0.2-second activation time, the gap between reaching for a light and actually having one ready. Its IP68-rated aluminum construction keeps the body slim enough for a jacket pocket and durable enough for conditions where most everyday carry flashlights start to fall short.

A 6500K daylight beam is what separates it from tactical lights that chase raw output over real visibility. Three brightness levels cover close-up task lighting through long-range awareness, and a strobe mode adds flexibility when conditions shift fast. The flashlight you carry into a dark trail or a power outage should not be a compromise between how it works and how it looks. BlackoutBeam carries 100 international awards and a $90 price that, against what it delivers, sits exactly where it should.

Click Here to Buy Now: $90.00

What We Like

  • 2,300 lumens and a 300-meter throw packed into an IP68-rated aluminum body narrow enough to slide into a jacket pocket
  • A 6500K daylight beam with three brightness levels and a strobe mode gives you real tactical range, not just a headline output number

What We Dislike

  • At $90, it sits at the higher end of the everyday carry flashlight price range for most budgets
  • Stock is extremely limited, making this a purchase you need to act on rather than schedule for later

3. Hot Pocket

Sierra Madre Research built the Hot Pocket around one specific frustration: climbing into a cold sleeping bag. The world’s first ultra-light multifunctional camp heater uses twin graphene heat panels sewn directly into the compression sack fabric, powered by a high-capacity USB-C Power Pack. It stores and compresses your sleeping bag or quilt during the day, then pre-heats it before you are ready to sleep. That sequence- store, compress, heat- has never lived inside a single piece of gear before.

The Hot Pocket comes in three sizes: Small compresses to 10 by 11 inches, Medium to 13 by 12, and Large to 15 by 11. When you are ready for sleep, open it, slip the heated panels inside your bag, and let the graphene do the work. At $287, it asks for a real commitment, but 118 reviews at 4.99 out of 5 tell you what a spec sheet cannot. Cold-weather camping feels different when your bed is already warm.

What We Like

  • Twin graphene heat panels pre-warm your sleeping bag before you get in, eliminating the cold start without hot water bottles or chemical packs
  • Functions as a compression sack, storage bag, and camp heater in one piece of kit, replacing rather than adding to what you carry

What We Dislike

  • At $287, the price asks for a committed cold-weather camper rather than a casual weekend tripper
  • Requires a charged Power Pack to function, adding a battery dependency that needs planning before every trip

4. Loki-Nav

Most compass tools treat survival features as accessories. The Loki-Nav by EckDesign treats them as the whole point. Built from GR5 Titanium or Aluminum with an IPX8-rated oil-filled compass core, it pairs precise navigation with a foldable, rotatable 12x loupe and an emergency mirror inside a body small enough to ride on a keychain. The compass core is also replaceable, meaning you are not retiring the entire tool when one component wears out over years of sustained field use.

The 12x loupe folds flat and rotates into position, precise enough to read fine print and functional enough to focus sunlight to start a fire when conditions demand it. The oil-filled compass holds calibration in temperatures that would render a phone completely useless. For anyone navigating terrain without reliable signal, that matters more than any digital backup. The Loki-Nav does not try to replace a smartphone. It tries to be the thing that works when your smartphone is the problem.

What We Like

  • The IPX8-rated oil-filled compass core is replaceable, extending the tool’s functional lifespan well beyond what a fixed-core design allows
  • The 12x loupe folds flat, rotates into position, and can focus sunlight to start a fire, making it a genuine survival instrument, not just a navigation aid

What We Dislike

  • The GR5 titanium version carries a premium price that may be difficult to justify for hikers who rarely venture off-grid
  • As a multi-tool, each function will not match the precision depth of a dedicated standalone instrument

5. Portable Fire Pit Stand

The Portable Fire Pit Stand treats setup and breakdown as part of the design, not an afterthought. Cut from SS400 black steel plate and engineered to resist warping under sustained heat, it assembles from flat-pack panels like puzzle pieces, no tools required. At 11.8 by 8.6 inches with a 7.8-inch height and a 22-pound load capacity, it holds through a full cooking session and compresses flat enough to leave camp without giving the pack-up a second thought.

The removable trivets are where it gets most useful for you in camp. Slot them in, and you have a raised platform for pots, pans, and kettles that covers grilling, frying, and boiling on the same rig. At $119, it brings Japanese material quality and a minimalist aesthetic to outdoor fire without the complexity most portable setups require. The flat black steel finish looks intentional around a campfire rather than improvised, and that distinction matters when everything else is stripped back.

Click Here to Buy Now: $119

What We Like

  • SS400 black steel plate resists warping under sustained heat and assembles from flat-pack panels without any tools, keeping setup as clean as the design itself
  • Removable trivets enable grilling, frying, and boiling on the same rig, adapting the stand to how you actually cook in camp

What We Dislike

  • Steel plate construction adds real weight, making it less suited for ultralight or long-haul hiking setups
  • At 11.8 by 8.6 inches, larger cooking arrangements may find the footprint limiting compared to wider grate setups

The Only Filter That Matters

September outdoor gear should earn its place in the bag rather than just fill it. Every piece on this list solves a real problem with design intention that goes well past the immediately obvious. The LUNARK Dual and the Loki-Nav push what a pocket-sized tool can actually carry. The BlackoutBeam reframes what activation speed means in practice. The Hot Pocket and the fire pit stand address the two most persistent annoyances in camp: sleeping cold and cooking without the right setup.

The price range here is deliberately wide. Not every pick suits every trip, and that is by design. What connects them all is the same refusal to separate how something works from how it is built. That is the shortest definition of good design, and the only filter this roundup used. Pick the one that fills the right gap in what you carry. That is where the value actually lives.

The post The 5 Best Outdoor Gear of September 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

Hisense E7SF packs MiniLED, 144Hz, and Fire TV into a seriously affordable big-screen TV

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There used to be two ways to buy a TV. Go cheap and squint through a mediocre picture, or spend enough that your banking app sends a concerned notification. Hisense’s E7SF exists to blow up that choice entirely. It runs a native 144Hz MiniLED panel, Hi-QLED color, and as many as 260 local dimming zones, paired with Fire TV and Alexa+, across six sizes from 50 inches up to a genuinely massive 100. The 50 inch model has already been spotted selling for under $400.

That price point used to buy a TV that struggled in daylight and looked worse the second a game turned on. MiniLED is the technology that fixed most of that, and until recently it was reserved for sets that cost real money. Hisense’s approach over the past few years has been to move formerly premium display technology down the price stack faster than the rest of the industry, and the E7SF is that philosophy in its most direct form. The brand’s role as the Official Sponsor of the FIFA World Cup 2026 and its standing as the number one brand globally in 100-inch and larger TVs gave it a huge stage this year, but the bigger takeaway is simpler: everyone now wants a bigger, brighter screen at home, and far more people can actually afford one.

Designer: Hisense

Click Here to Buy Now: $697.96 $799.99 (13% off). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

MiniLED backlighting replaces the standard LED array behind an LCD panel with a system that improves how light is managed across the screen and brings out more detail in every scene. More zones means tighter control over which parts of the image are bright and which go dark, producing better contrast, deeper blacks, and more vivid highlights across the panel. On the E7SF, that backlight scales to up to 260 dimming zones depending on the screen size selected. Hi-QLED color technology layers on top of that foundation, designed to keep every shade, scene, and skin tone looking true to life, rendering every scene convincingly real, just as the creator intended. The result is a picture that competes meaningfully with displays that cost significantly more just two or three years ago.

AI Picture runs continuously in the background, reading what’s on screen and instantly fine-tuning the picture so colors pop, details shine, and everything looks natural and clear, without any manual settings required. The E7SF supports Dolby Vision IQ, HDR10+ Adaptive, HDR10, and HLG, covering every major HDR format, which brings brighter highlights, deeper contrast, and richer color in every scene no matter what’s on screen. Dolby Vision IQ adjusts the picture based on ambient lighting in the room, keeping the image calibrated whether the curtains are open or the lights are off. Filmmaker Mode preserves the original aspect ratio, color, frame rate, and sound so viewers watch movies exactly as directors intended. The full HDR stack future-proofs the set against whatever content the studios push out over the next few years, which matters more than any single format badge on the box.

Sports content gets dedicated handling, with the TV automatically recognizing sports content and adjusting picture and sound settings for the action, delivering smoother motion, clearer details, and boosted crowd audio that recreates the excitement of being in the stadium. Dolby Atmos handles the immersive audio experience more broadly, pulling picture and sound together so viewers see, hear, and feel like they’re right in the middle of the action. The E7SF carries a 20W 2.0 multi-channel system on the 50 to 85 inch models and steps up to a 50W 2.1 system with a dedicated woofer channel on the 100 inch. Bluetooth Audio rounds it out for wireless headphone setups, and the whole audio package scales sensibly with the screen size it’s attached to.

Native 144Hz on a TV at this price tier does real work, particularly in gaming, where many competing sets still pad the marketed refresh number through motion interpolation rather than delivering it natively from the panel. Two HDMI 2.1 ports run at full 4K at 144Hz, keeping the signal chain from a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X completely uncompromised. AMD FreeSync Premium matches the TV’s refresh rate to the connected graphics card, delivering reduced lag, minimized tearing, and fluid motion for a more immersive gaming experience. Dolby Vision Gaming and HDR10+ Gaming keep HDR active during play without requiring a manual mode switch. Game Booster 240 and ALLM, which switches the set into game mode automatically when a gaming device is detected, round out a feature set that sits well above what most TVs at this price level bother to include.

Hisense spent the World Cup cycle positioning itself as the brand for communal, big-screen viewing, and the E7SF still feels like the clearest expression of that idea after the tournament dust has settled. Fire TV manages the smart platform, with Alexa+ built into the voice remote for cross-app content search, smart home management, and watchlist sync, all handled through natural speech. Six sizes span from 50 to 100 inches, and a 100-inch MiniLED television at a mainstream price point is genuinely new territory. A screen that size used to require a custom installation budget. Now it’s an off-the-shelf decision. That shift is arguably the bigger story the E7SF is telling, and at the price Hisense is asking, it’s a hard argument to walk away from.

Click Here to Buy Now: $697.96 $799.99 (13% off). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

The post Hisense E7SF packs MiniLED, 144Hz, and Fire TV into a seriously affordable big-screen TV first appeared on Yanko Design.

This $120 Lumibricks Manga Shop Glows Like Cyberpunk Shibuya at Midnight

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Anyone who has wandered Tokyo’s Nakano Broadway knows the joy of a cramped shop stacked floor to ceiling with secondhand manga. Those shops smell like old paper and feel like treasure hunts, and Lumibricks has imagined what one might look like in a neon cyberpunk future. The Manga Shop is a 1,699-piece building block set where a wooden Japanese bookstore gets retrofitted with neon signs, exposed cables, and a robot raccoon on the roof. The tiled roof and lattice windows stay proudly old school while the billboard out front glows like a Shibuya crossing at midnight. It’s a street corner caught somewhere between the Showa era and a sci-fi anime.

In the set’s backstory, paper manga is nearly extinct, and a collector named Eiji Fushimi scans rare volumes with a vintage eye implant to keep the stories alive. He shares the shop with Akira Tachibana, a genius hacker, and Yuzu Kurose, an office worker who spends every free minute buried in manga. Two interior sections slide out, revealing a browsing aisle stocked with printed manga covers and a VIP reading room upstairs. The set also connects to Lumibricks’ existing Izakaya set, letting the two buildings share one power supply and form a glowing little street. At $119.99, it’s a pretty convincing excuse to start building your own Neoncity block by block.

Designer: Lumibricks

A translucent red torii gate frames the entrance, and above it hangs a NEUVA billboard whose printed anime artwork glows blue and magenta. A tall orange MANGA sign climbs the corner, while a pink ドキドキ neon (the Japanese sound effect for a racing heartbeat) sits over the lower eave. Up top, red and blue cables run from a dish on the tiled roof into the billboard, basically the set’s whole theme summed up in two tubes. Then there’s the raccoon, a heart-eyed robot sprawled across the roof with a fan bolted to its arm and a manga page in its paw. Street level gets a gashapon machine, an arcade cabinet, a red lantern, and a black cat guarding its food bowl.

Cyberpunk has always borrowed from Japan, going back to Ridley Scott filling Blade Runner’s Los Angeles with Japanese billboards and Katsuhiro Otomo drawing Neo-Tokyo in Akira. The Manga Shop flips that around by starting with a traditional Japanese shopfront and letting the future creep in through the wiring. The tiled gable, lattice windows, and wooden eaves look like a neighborhood store your grandparents might have shopped at. The neon and tech feel bolted on rather than built in, which is exactly the point of the story. It’s a smart bit of worldbuilding for a toy, and it gives the design a logic beyond simply piling on glowing bits.

The lighting runs off a single USB-C cable or a battery box that takes three AA batteries, though you’ll need to supply your own batteries or power adapter. Getting there takes patience, since Brick Fanatics scored the build a rough 3 out of 10 in its review, citing unclear instructions and tiny wire connectors. The wires thread between studs with the included tweezers, and one step asks you to apply a minuscule contact strip with copper markings the right way round. That’s an odd exception in a set that otherwise skips stickers entirely, using 81 printed pieces and 35 metallic spray-painted parts instead. Budget around eight hours, and maybe a snack.

At $119.99, the Manga Shop undercuts Lumibricks’ 2,227-piece Neon Tech Tower, which sells for $150, and buying direct currently adds a free 388-piece micro version of the Izakaya and Manga Shop while supplies last. Up to four compatible sets can share one power supply, so your Neoncity street has a natural cap before you need another plug. Brick Fanatics still found the finished model worth the cursing once the neon came on, and the photos make that easy to believe. My only real gripe is the three included figures, whose hands can’t hold any of the manga the shop is built around. For a store dedicated to paper, nobody inside can actually read.

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