With the start of the New Year comes a renewed drive to streamline our working lives. Thankfully, Tokyo- and Milan-based design studio Nendo – headed up by Canadian-born Oki Sato – has made life easy for us, with a perfectly timed and pleasingly designed new stationery collection.
Sato's philosophy is to re-imagine quotidian objects and needs in a way that provides what he epigrammatically calls a small ‘!' moment. To wit, the one-time Wallpaper* Design Award winner offers a neatly realised set of desk essentials that has plenty of those, including everything from a bottomless ‘outline’ pencil tray to a traditional Japanese gift-giving envelope and a cubic rubber band.
The designs may be simple, functional and clean but, on closer inspection, reveal clever conceits. The ‘contrast ruler’, for example, features markings that fade from black to white (making it easy to use on both dark and light surfaces) while the ‘circle tag’ playfully transforms traditional sticky notes into pie chart wedges.
The stationery collection will be released under Nendo’s own brand, by | n, which recently made its debut with a set of chocolate paints.
The 'contrast ruler' features markings that fade from white to black, making it to easy to use on dark and light surfaces alike
Eschewing the conventional stationery container, Nendo's 'outline trays' are bottomless. The frame form makes it easier to clean inside the tray and when not in use, they can be stacked for compact storage
Nendo's cubic rubber bands make them easy to find and pick out of a drawer
Edge note' is a notebook with colour edges to help with filing; notebooks can be shelved upside down with the edges pointing out to distinguish the one currently in use
The notebook, which features a missing corner, also contains pages printed in a light cross pattern to provide a visual surface that can accomodate both writing and sketching
The 'circle tag' playfully transforms traditional square sticky notes into pie chart wedges, which can likewise be used to mark pages
The ingenuity of the 'flip pen' lies in its cap; removing the cap reveals a regular ballpoint pen...
...while reversing the cap turns the pen into a tablet stylus
The 'cross pen-stand' stabilises each pen sperately and is able to hold wide objects like rulers and flat objects like cards and paper neatly in place
Flip back the sides of this pen case once it's opened, and it turns into an upright pen holder suitable for mobile and desk use
Dot envelope' is a contemporary take on the traditional Japanese gift-giving envelope, with the customary decorative tie pattern being recreated entirely in embossed dots
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