Top modern gifts for people who love great design – YD Holiday Gift Guide 2021

We took the thinking and planning out of gift-giving so you don’t have to worry about what to buy for yourself or for a loved one this holiday season! Here’s a list of great home, kitchen, and lifestyle products to spark joy in your life and the lives of the people around you. The one thing that’s common across all of them? The fact that they’re clever and innovative products that get the stamp of approval from the design-elves at the YD headquarters.

Be sure to snag some of these products while they’re around (and on discount), or share them with a friend/relative/partner if you want to give them hints!


Air6+ Air Purifier by YFLife

The AIR6Plus purifier by YFLife is about the size of a smart speaker and can be placed anywhere within the house… yet within it is air purifying technology so advanced, it’s even used by NASA. Referred to as photocatalytic oxidation or PCO, this technology obliterates any kind of germ or organic compound, turning it into CO2 and water. The technology would normally sound like overkill for using inside our homes on planet earth, but considering deteriorating air quality, the presence of pathogens, and a whole host of other organic compounds (smoke even) … it actually makes for a rather advanced air purifier that gives you the cleanest breathable air possible. Operating with a simple touch of a button, the AIR6Plus comes with 3 fan modes, and can sanitize the air down to 0.001 micrometers within a space of 360 sqft without generating any sound or even any waste… and with a ridiculously energy-efficient power consumption of 13W (that’s about as much as an LED bulb). Grab one for a YD-special discount below!
Click Here to Buy Now. 15% Discount Code YankoHolidays15

Nanopresso Handheld Espresso Maker by Wacaco

An espresso-maker that’s smaller than a Starbucks cup, the Nanopresso from Wacaco is designed to give you the most luxuriously rich and crema-laden coffee wherever you go. Just load hot water into the Nanopresso, pack coffee grounds into the pod (or use a Nespresso pod of your own), and the Nanopresso’s custom-designed pumping system can generate a whopping 18 bars (261 PSI) of pressure, pushing the hot water right through the tightly packed coffee grounds to produce up to 80ml (or two shots) of pure concentrated espresso. The Nanopresso also comes with a cup to dispense your fresh coffee in, and requires no electricity to use, making it perfect both at home or even outdoors. Once you’re caffeinated for the day, the Nanopresso is easy to clean, and even comes with a nifty EVA foam case to carry it around in!
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Koda 12 Compact Pizza Oven by Ooni

Imagine never having to stand for hours outside Lucali’s to get some crazy good Neapolitan-style pizza. Or rather, imagine being able to make that pizza right at home! That’s what the Koda by Ooni promises, with its ridiculously compact design that can frankly sit on most outdoor tabletops, letting you turn any table into an instant pizzeria. The Koda 12 is small enough to make a 12-inch pizza or calzone, and comes with a foldable design that you can flat-pack and carry home with you once you’re done (and once the pizza oven’s cooled down, obviously). The compact little gas-powered oven takes mere minutes to set up, and can heat up to ripping dough-baking temperatures in just 15 minutes. Use it to make pizzas, breads, babkas, steaks, or even grill veggies!
Click Here to Buy Now

Nanoleaf Shapes Modular Wall Lights by Nanoleaf

The year is 2021 and wallpaper has just been rendered obsolete. Meet the Nanoleaf Shapes, a series of slim, smart LED panels that come in geometric shapes and can be connected to one another to create a dynamic work of art on your walls. The modular panels can be used to create shapes, patterns, textures, even text, and they add a touch of color to spaces when off, but completely transform the ambiance of a room when switched on! The smart LED panels work via touch, and can instantly be transformed into an interactive installation that changes hues when you touch any of the panels. Alternatively, they can connect to your smart speaker and change colors to the rhythm of the music you play, or better still, hook them to your television and activate Match Mode, which lets the Nanoleaf panels light up to match the colors on your TV screen, creating an immersive experience that’s nonpareil!
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Bradley Element Tactile Wristwatch by Eone

Easily one of the most iconic watches of modern time, the Bradley watch from Eone comes with a spectacular design that’s backed by an even more incredible story. Named after former naval officer and Paralympic Gold medalist Bradley Snyder, the watch hopes to champion inclusive design by being a timepiece that you can read not just with your eyes, but with your hands too. The watch hopes to celebrate the brave legacy of officer Bradley, who lost his vision while diffusing bombs during his time stationed in Afghanistan. Championing Bradley’s no-can-do attitude, the watch features two ball-bearings that magnetically travel around the timepiece’s face to read the time (one bearing on the front tells the minutes, and another on the rim tells the hours). The wearer can simply run their finger across the watch to feel for the bearings and get an immediate sense of what the time is. If the bearings shift position while you touch them, they can slide immediately back thanks to the underlying magnets… which make the award-winning tactile timepiece double up as a nifty toy too!
Click Here to Buy Now

Millo Wireless Blender by Millo

Designed like something out of Apple’s or Dyson’s design studio, the Millo is a smart, sophisticated, and silent blender, that makes 4x lesser noise than your conventional blender, generates twice as less heat, and 2x more energy efficient. Moreover, using it is bafflingly futuristic. Just load your smoothie ingredients into the Millo, screw the top on, and rest it inverted on the base… and just like a phone starts charging the moment you rest it on a wireless-charging surface, the Millo begins whirring and blitzing all your ingredients into a fine smoothie. You can control the Millo’s intensity by sliding your finger around the rim of the base, as lights under the surface come to life, letting you see what power you’re running the blender at. When you’re done, lift the blender up and the blade magically stops spinning. It’s a sight to absolutely admire! Yes, this blender is everything Steve Jobs would love. It’s sleek, wireless, quiet, and removes any ugly mechanical details that would blemish the blender’s pristine design. Oh, and the base is made out of Aluminium too!
Click Here to Buy Now

ZenBeam Latte L1 Portable Projector by ASUS

Rather adorably named the Latte, this coffee-glass-shaped device from ASUS is actually a portable projector, capable of delivering 720p content while also functioning as a speaker-system. The ZenBeam Latte blends 720p HD projection and Harman/Kardon audio performance into a compact, lightweight, and ultra-portable design that’s similar in size, shape, and weight to a grande cup of coffee. The tiny projector can project screens measuring up to 120-inches in size, and works seamlessly with iOS and Android devices. Go ahead and Netflix & Chill in style!
Click Here to Buy Now

Levitating Smart Moon Lamp by Gingko

Dim the lights and switch the Gingko Smart Moon Lamp on and it quite literally looks like you’ve got a supermoon inside your home! Having gone certifiably viral on TikTok, its gravity-defying levitating design completes the illusion, creating a pretty remarkable-looking prop that’s great for decor as well as photography! The floating moon comes 3D printed from translucent PLA, complete with craters and undulating surface details to make it look like the real thing, and it floats on its base too, gently rotating as a planetary object would. 140mm (5.5 inches) in diameter, the moon floats on a wooden base made of dark walnut or light ash wood, suspended in place by a strong rare-earth magnet. It comes with built-in LEDs that give the moon its signature glow, with 3 light temperatures to choose from – warm white (3500k) and white (5000k), and a special yellow warm (2700k) for that rare blood moon effect! Each Smart Moon Lamp comes with its base and a 12V- 1A AD adapter to power the entire experience. Plus, Gingko offers a cool 2-year warranty that should quite literally send you ‘over the moon!’
Click Here to Buy Now

The post Top modern gifts for people who love great design – YD Holiday Gift Guide 2021 first appeared on Yanko Design.

Nanoleaf’s colorful wall tiles now act as Razer gaming controls

Nanoleaf and Razer teamed up last year to making gaming an even more immersive experience. Thanks to integrations between Nanoleaf's modular lights and Razer's Synapse IoT platform, gamers could enjoy everything from event-based flashes and explosion...

Nanoleaf’s modular light squares can be turned into smart buttons

Nanoleaf is launching an upgrade to its Canvas Smarter Kit lights that will let you turn them into buttons to control Apple Homekit devices, all with simply a touch -- and without your smartphone. The new feature, which is dubbed Touch Actions, is go...

Review: Nanoleaf Aurora Light Panels

These days, there are lots of ways you can add colorful light to your rooms, but most of them involve changing out standard lightbulbs with LED ones. If you’re looking for something that’s more of a cool accent light you can hang on your wall, you should definitely check out the Nanoleaf Aurora.

This modular system of LED light panels lets you create unique pieces of self-illuminating wall art. After seeing a set of these over on our sister site, The Awesomer, I decided to test out a set to see how they really work. Most people wanting to get started with the Aurora will want to go for the Aurora Smarter Kit, which includes nine light panels and connectors, a controller, power supply, and mounting tape.

This kit should be enough to create a single wall light that’s about 2 to 3 feet across, depending on the design you go with. Since each light is triangular, you can snap them together to create a wide variety of shapes. Connecting the pieces is simple – just slide the connector into any side of the triangle, then slide another triangle onto the connector that’s sticking out.

Once you connect the small controller module and plug that into the power supply, you can immediately verify that they work, as the panels first glow white, then go into a color cycling mode as a self-test. Unlike some other LED lights which use only red, green, and blue LEDs, these also have white, so they can create pure and bright white, pastel, and daylight colors – in addition to rich jewel tones.

Note that the variance in color at the corners seen in the photos here isn’t really noticeable to the naked eye, and is a photographic artifact. In person, the light tiles all appear smooth and evenly colored from edge to edge.

It’s at this point that you’ll want to experiment with your design and lay it out on a tabletop before hanging it on the wall.  I went through a few different designs before arriving at the pattern I decided to go with. The kit also includes nine triangular vellum tracing templates you can tack up on your wall, in case you’d like to test the layout on the wall before committing.

Before you hang the lights up, I also recommend pairing them with the companion app to make sure you can remotely control them. I used the iOS app, but there’s also a version for Android. It took no time for my phone to find the Aurora panels, but I learned the hard way that they don’t seem to like to connect to 5 GHz Wi-Fi networks, and it seems as if they automatically try to connect to whatever network your phone is on. That said, I recommend first connecting your phone to the 2.4 GHz side of your Wi-Fi router before attempting to connect the Aurora. You can switch your phone back to the other network once setup is done.

After connecting to the app, simply flip the tiles over, and attach the included rectangles of double-stick tape at each triangle’s corners, then start sticking the tiles onto the wall. I strongly suggest starting with a single tile and using a level to make sure it’s straight. After the first tile is placed, you can add them in groups of two or three. One thing that isn’t immediately clear is if the included mounting tape is easily removable. The online tutorial videos show the tiles using 3M removable Command strips, but that’s not what came in my box, so if you’re worried about pulling paint off of your wall if you ever move these, you might want to double-check with Nanoleaf support. Of course, you can always buy a pack of Command strips if you want to be sure.

Here’s what my completed light sculpture looks like on the wall in my basement media room. I was going for a sort of abstract snake design – it reminds me of the classic video game on my old Nokia phone.

The companion app works well, allowing you to choose from a selection of pre-built color schemes and animations, and you can also make your own.

There are several different animation patterns, and the app is smart enough to automatically understand the configuration of your tiles based on how they’re connected together. This makes drawing out new color schemes super simple.

The app also allows you to schedule presets, so you can use it to set the lights to go on as a visual alarm of sorts, or to automatically set the mood for different times of the day.

It also supports multiple rooms and multiple Aurora kits, and is fully compatible with Apple HomeKit, which provides for centralized control of other smarthome devices, as well as voice control via Siri. It also works with Amazon Alexa. Both voice integration features worked without a hitch for me, though I prefer controlling things via Alexa.

While the $199.99 Starter (er, “smarter”) Kit comes with nine panels, you can purchase additional panels in sets of three for $59.99. Since a single Smarter Kit can power up to 30 Aurora panels, you can create much larger and more complex artworks than the one I ended up with on my wall.

The Nanoleaf Aurora Smarter Kit is available from Best Buy, the Apple Store, MoMA, and direct from Nanoleaf.