Yanko Design - Form Beyond Function

Vacuum sealers are one of those great ideas that only seems to exist in infomercials because I don’t know anyone who actually uses one. Perhaps if it were built into the refrigerator, it might actually come in handy! That’s the idea behind Zero – a smart fridge that aims to bring your food waste and wasted space down to zero.

A vacuum sealer feature is integrated directly on the door so you can quickly seal and store unused food. Just place the food item in the bag, place the edge into the slot and it will remove air before sealing it. This prolongs the usability of items ranging from meat to fruit, keeping them fresh and protecting them from bacteria. When food is vacuum sealed, it also marks the “best before date” and transmits the type of food and its expiration date to the user’s smartphone so they can easily check expiration dates. This comes in handy when grocery shopping and when deciding what to have for dinner!

As for storage, the buit-in hanging system makes it easy to access packaged items and also make storage more efficient by occupying space that would otherwise be empty.

Designers: Wanki Kim, Ara Jo, Seunghee Seo, Soyeon Na & Nahyeon Park

Store-bought cards are so last decade. They may be quick and convenient, but they lack that personal touch which means so much in a special occasion. However it’s interesting to note that something that pre-dates the store-bought card is actually making quite the comeback. A quick browse through social media and you’ll see the likes of Moyagraphy and how popular bespoke wax seals have gotten over the past few years (a lot of credit to the Hogwarts Acceptance Letter from Harry Potter!)

The process with the wax seal however hasn’t changed much since the Middle Ages, when it was introduced as a tamper-proof sign of authenticity. Seals bearing the insignia of royalty or the elite held together envelopes and scrolls, letting people authenticate their official documents. Today, wax stamps have become a great craft/design tool to add your bespoke element to letters and invitations in a delightfully retro manner. Even today, people manually melt sticks of wax that drip over paper after which they press a metal stamp (with a lathe-spun wood handle) against it to create the seal. Stamptitude is out to change that. Being the ‘Wax Seal Specialists’ that they are, and perhaps the only company devoted to modernizing a millennium old tradition turned design fad, the Aluma by Stamptitude looks at the old practice through a modern lens. In a way, it is to wax seals what the space pen is to ink-writing.

The Aluma comes with a svelte, space gray solid aluminum handle that has a powerful neodymium earth magnet at its base. The magnet’s purpose is to hold various stamp-heads, allowing you to switch designs simply by unplugging the old head and replacing it with a new one. The new head clicks into place, thanks to the powerful rare-earth magnet, and is designed to withstand a lifetime of usage. Aluma allows you to customize as many heads with your own design logo that come engraved and polished to perfection for you to begin using out of the box. Stamptitude also revolutionized the wax deposition system by providing a bag of custom sized wax pellets that you can use for your melting and stamping work. Each pellet is perfectly calibrated for one good stamp, so you never over-pour or under-pour your wax.

The Aluma comes courtesy Stamptitude, a brand that’s hailed as the Wax Seal Specialists of our time, and also having worked extensively with brands like Disney, Dior, and even the Grammys! The design of the Aluma deviates from its medieval heritage to create something that goes hand in hand with the design language we see in today’s premium stationery. Aside from Aluma’s minimal, elite, space-cigar-esque aesthetic, it also redefines and improves the medieval practice of wax stamping (allowing you to interchange stamp heads and standardizing wax pellets), bringing a much needed modern avatar to a tool that helps creating the most beautiful and bespoke letters and invitations you’ve ever seen!

Designers: Oli Soden & Charles Lo of Stamptitude

Click here to Buy Now: $55.00

Features a revolutionary magnetic fitting, allowing the user to switch quickly and easily between multiple engraved stamp head designs.

Each ALUMA wax seal will come with 10 x wax pellets. One ALUMA branded wax pellet is enough to seal a single envelope, which is another industry first. Traditional wax pellets or ‘beads’ as they are more commonly referred to are much smaller and require at least 3-4 to make a full seal.

Click here to Buy Now: $55.00

The Roto desk is a difficult one to describe because it’s like nothing you’ve seen before! The design utilizes vertical space without needing extra elements like hooks or shelving on the walls.

Composed of beech rods, T-connector joints and canvas, an enveloping structure of raw materials is created and can be customized and reorganized to suit the user’s individual spatial requirements and functional needs. The vertical structure also creates visual separation and privacy, however, the structure can easily be twisted open at the joint sections for an open feel. Free of drawers or cubbies, the draped canvas serves as versatile, flexible storage for everything from books to writing utensils!

Designer: Anna Andrzejewska

Anyone who’s lived in a rainy city knows the trials and tribulations of using an umbrella. As much as they keep you dry, they can also make your entryway a soppy wet mess. Even worse, the trapped moisture when you roll it up can create mildew. Designer Do Hyeung Kim aims to combat these issues using tech from the best brand for drying – Dyson!

Both an umbrella stand and a dryer, it harnesses the power of Dyson’s cyclone motor system to quietly yet effectively blast a wet umbrella with warm air. Within a minute, the entire umbrella will be mostly dry and free of collected moisture that can result in bacteria and bad smells. Perfect for everywhere from home mudrooms to hotel lobbies, it’s an great way to keep entryways as dry as your umbrella keeps you!

Designer: Do Hyeung KIm

I can almost guarantee that Game of Thrones would have looked a lot cooler had they put this polystyrene filled, wool felt chair in it instead. Maybe not cooler, but more playful. The Narl Chair is an Omnidirectional rocking chair, with a rocking base made from high-density polyurethane foam and leather hide.

Narl is the winner of the NYCxDesign student design award, and there’s a very good reason for that too. Carl Durkow, the designer of the Narl Chair, said “when an adult sits in the Narl chair, their feet are unable to touch the ground, and they are reverted to a childlike state. There is a Montessori philosophy about empowering children by giving them furniture scaled to their size so that their feet can touch the ground. I want to achieve the opposite of this.” A truly fun and exciting new chair, the Narl is everything you didn’t know you wanted.

Designer: Carl Durkow

The Mac Caddy is just pure genius, from concept, to execution, to even the name (Mac Daddy, geddit?)! The Mac Caddy is, in short, a desk-declutterer. It uses the iMac’s slim design and the fat bezel at the top to create a nice storage unit that hangs stealthily at the back of your iMac, away from sight, but within reach. The caddy holds everything from your bits and bobs (it even comes with a small stationery container), keeping things easy to access without the negative side-effects of a messy table. The caddy’s design comes with a slit on its side which makes it easy to store wired devices like your phone while it’s charging or connected to the machine, or even a hard-drive that sits in the caddy, perpetually connected to the USB at the base of the iMac’s back. Another brilliant design decision was to include the webcam guard into the caddy’s design. The removable guard sits on the lip of the Mac Caddy, covering your webcam to protect your privacy, and can be easily removed when you need to use the webcam for a web chat or an AMA, or in case you’re one of those rare Twitch gamers who games on a Mac. Either way, your viewers will definitely appreciate how clean and minimal your desk/workspace is!

Designer: Quan Li of MAQE

The Creamsicle’s inspiration is pretty apparent. Its warm orange tones and the way the blades orient themselves around the rim rather than the hub creates a negative space that gives it a citrus-y feeling. While the fan itself is a hubless fan with a design language that’s familiar because of Dyson’s work in the area… its blade design steals the show with its refreshing, fun, tangerine nature. It almost makes the fan itself look cool and refreshing like a glass of Fanta or Tang. Perhaps that perception carries forward to the air the fan pushes out, making the Creamsicle fan seem more efficient at cooling you down than say any regular fan.

The Creamsicle fan, aside from being hubless, comes with a pivot at the base of the ring, allowing you to position the fan to point anywhere. The blades come in a translucent plastic, making them look more and more like their citric inspiration. I wonder if they come in more colors! I would love to see a beautiful, fresh lime green variant!

Designer: Kieran Moriarty

I don’t know if I’m the only one, and I surely hope I’m not, but good stationery really gives me a rush. I have this impulse to buy fancy mechanical pencils, or inks, or coloring sets just because they look remarkable and I wear them as badges of being a good designer with good tools of trade. I’m not the only one, right?

So you’ll understand how my heart palpitates at the sight of the XYZ series of measuring tools. They exude a class not often seen in stationery and boy, they look more like pieces of art than technical instruments. Designed in pure metallic matte black, with a form language of just geometric shapes like straight lines and circles (rather apt for geometric tools, I’d say), the XYZ set comprises a vernier caliper, measuring tape, compass, and laser dimensioner. They all look beautiful together as a family, and even separately. Minimal styling and a great UX unite them all. Each of them come with a dotted matrix that behaves as a screen as individual LEDs behind the dots light up to beautifully and minimally give your measurements digital values. The numeric values even sync with your phone, so that you can digitally store all your entries for cross-referencing later.

Along with the products, the branding and packaging embody an abstract, minimal, and dark/brooding attitude that gives the stationery the sort of seductive appeal you’d see in consumer electronics… Oh be still, my beating heart!

Designers: Pascal Ruelle, Nico Gibson & Ishmael Adams.