Design

Design

There's something quietly rebellious about seeing delicate leather straps wrapped around cold, hard steel. It's unexpected, a bit contradictory, and exactly what makes Nara Lee's Pul collection so captivating. The Paris-based architect just unveiled this sculptural furniture series at The Sun Room exhibition in Seoul, and it's turning heads for all the right reasons. What strikes you first about these pieces isn't just their minimalist beauty, but the story they tell about urban nature.

Once confined to the aerospace and automotive industries, composite materials have taken on an increasingly central role in contemporary architecture. By combining two or more components, such as fibers and polymers, they offer lightness and strength, high durability, formal freedom, and enhanced environmental performance. Their incorporation into architectural practice marks a profound transformation in how we design, fabricate, and inhabit space.

Each year, the AD100 issue is our love letter to the extraordinary minds shaping the way we live,

The retrospective felt like a breakthrough. The team diagnosed exactly where their reasoning broke down, mapped the root causes, and committed to doing better. Three months later, they repeated the same mistakes. The diagnosis was accurate. What was missing was a system to turn awareness into development. Diagnosis alone doesn't create change. Most improvement efforts fail not from lack of insight, but from lack of judgment infrastructure.

But back to that gifted lamp: a swirly based, Rococo-style Kartell piece made from transparent acrylic. The Stockholm-based designer received it as a confirmation gift while growing up in Borås, Sweden. "It's so not trendy right now, but it's cool," he says. "I should bring it out-it's in my parents' attic." The lamp is playful. A bit ironic. High-low. It's no wonder he loves it.

The Victorian Stone project by Iris Ceramica (part of Iris Ceramica Group) continues its evolution, focusing on the expressive power of three-dimensional wall surfaces. This extension introduces a line of white-body coverings, reinforcing the ceramic project's ability to bring a sense of nature, peace, and solidity to contemporary spaces. Designed to be a chameleonic project that balances matter and light, the latest additions create a refined and cozy environment, offering boundless design possibilities.

'Making is no longer a linear, directive process; it becomes a co-evolution shaped by multiple intelligences operating simultaneously across material, biological, and spatial scales,'

Candles have been in use in some way, shape, or form for thousands of years. It's believed that both the ancient Egyptians and the Romans created a kind of wicked candle using rolled papyrus that was repeatedly dipped in melted beeswax or tallow. For centuries, until the advent electricity, they were an essential part of daily life. Today, the tapers, votives, and pillars we decorate our homes with are mostly just that-decoration-but that means they're ripe for creativity, and designers certainly take notice.

In Accra, where public investment in recreational space is limited and green areas increasingly scarce, the Backyard Community Club proposes a new model for shared civic life: a community sports facility centered on a tennis court, demonstrating how design can deliver inclusive, sustainable, and socially transformative environments. Designed by DeRoche Projects, it is Ghana's first project using a precast rammed earth system an innovative method pioneered by the studio that reimagines an ancestral material for contemporary, scalable use.

Nang House sits in the rural outskirts of Hanoi, Vietnam, a place where new construction presses steadily into long-established village patterns. Designed by Trung Tran Studio for a three-generation household, the residential project works with the grain of its surroundings rather than clearing it away. Mature trees occupy the garden, and every one remains in place. Their canopies shape the roofline and guide circulation, producing quiet pockets of shade that soften the presence of brick and tile.

Norihito Yamauchi + 33 More SpecsLess Specs Norihito Yamauchi Text description provided by the architects.

This article shows a practical pattern for generating utility classes in CSS I've used in one form or another since 2016. Utility classes can give us a fast, consistent way to apply design system values in markup, without sprinkling hard‑coded styles across your project. As I discussed in my article on Creating Design System Friendly Snowflakes with Utility Classes, utility classes can really help offer a middle ground between rigid components and completely custom CSS.

I love a good candle, but I'm not very good at burning them correctly. Even when I follow all of the instructions, I still end up with tunneled candles that are unusable halfway through their burn life. That's why I was so excited when I tried out the Dark Cypress candle from San Soli - it's the first candle I've ever been able to burn all the way to the end, and the scent is right up my alley.

The process is not often as linear as we [designers] would like it to be, and at times we even get slightly cut out, and something comes out on the other side that wasn't really what we were expecting,

Every user's home office is different, but they all have one thing in common, Desire to create a better space. Spend more good time and work there. But somehow we have no space at home, we work at the kitchen table, sofa, or bedroom because of lack of space. My aim was to build and improve a product which can be used by a large number of users in the home office space.

Before Scandinavian design became synonymous with pale wood floors and clean-lined chairs, it was a response to everyday life in the Nordic countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland). It developed in response to the region's long, sun-deprived winters, shaping its emphasis on natural materials, usefulness, and bright interiors. Beyond its cozy sense of "hygge," the Danish concept of contented well-being, Scandinavian design is also philosophical. It reflects an investment in craftsmanship and the belief that well-made objects can - and should - improve daily living.

Coined Rebel Pink, IKEA's newest color of the year is a hue that brings "a bold response to the need for joy, energy and self-expression," says Abbey Stark, home furnishing direction leader at IKEA U.S. The color is heavily featured in the new GREJSIMOJS collection, a set created by 12 designers that celebrates the importance of joy and play for both kids and adults.

David Andora, a multidisciplinary creative who's worked in branding, production design, specialized lighting, and parade events, set out to understand why Christmas looks so different today. He discovered that, with the advent of LED technology, classic holiday lighting has become something of a lost art. "When LED lights started becoming the norm for Christmas lights, which happened quite a while ago, one of the things that was completely missing was that warm, peachy glow that came off of those incandescent painted big bulbs," Andora says.

It's always nice to reunite with ornaments that are family heirlooms - but if you don't have any passed-down pieces, then you might end up shopping for new ornaments this holiday season. However, you don't necessarily have to buy a new set to add new magic to a holiday tree; instead, consider your kitchen first. One content creator found a stunning way to repurpose vintage china plates into gorgeous tree adornments.

As the name implies, pattern play involves styling different patterns together to craft vibrant spaces that are visually arresting and showcase the homeowners' distinctive personal style. Pattern play is full of possibilities - from checkered curtains with floral wallpaper to a statement rug and a striped couch, any and all surfaces in the home can be experimented with.

PAO (People's Architecture Office) has inserted the Rotary Membrane Bridge installation into the public space through a gentle intervention approach.

Design Mindset, Yanko Design's weekly podcast, treats the creative process as something you can actively shape rather than something that just happens to you. Each episode digs into the habits, mental models, and practical tools that move designers from tentative to decisive, from endlessly tweaking to actually shipping work. Now in its fourteenth episode, the show is starting to feel like a standing studio critique in audio form, where process and mindset get equal billing with aesthetics.

This year, it seems like everyone is leaning into nostalgia with their holiday decorations. From old-school colorful lights to tinsel trees, even Ralph Lauren Christmas, I am loving the campiness of it all. The absolute hottest holiday decoration, in fact, is something you might not have thought much about since grade school, and it'll cost you next to nothing, aside from perhaps an afternoon. You might have seen them all over your TikTok feed - that's right, this year's holiday hero is the paper chain garland.

Cartoonist Fell In Love With Van Gogh's Story And Paintings As A Teenager, Creates Illustrations Of Painter's Life

Conceived as a public structure addressing the limited availability of comfortable beachfront space, the pavilion forms a geometric intervention within the Adriatic landscape. Its triangular plan incorporates an open central void and a perimeter walkway that supports activities such as swimming, resting, and small-scale gatherings. The pavilion's form produces a defined relationship between water, city, and port, framing views and creating varied spatial conditions depending on movement, light, and tide.

Tinadas, pigsties, mills, and washhouses populate this natural landscape of the Sierra de Segura alongside small, generally abandoned villages. Remnants that were once an essential part of everyday life and the memory of thousands of anonymous men and women who inhabited these landscapes. People forced to abandon their homes and lands to create an environment where they could enjoy hunting, disregarding their rights.

"We're no longer just designing workplaces, we're actually designing experiences," said Yuen, at the Fortune Brainstorm Design forum in Macau on Dec. 2. "You've really got to make the campus or the workplace more than work, and that's the fun part of it."