Hasta La Ideas

Perhaps the most appropriate way to describe the Arc Pen is to use the phrase “What if a pen was somehow a combination of simple and advanced?” With a form, interaction, and experience that makes it the Apple of pen-design, the Arc Pen comes from Germany-based multiple-award-winning design studio stilform. Known for working with simple shapes and subtly beautiful magnetic interactions, the Arc Pen follows suit with a magnetic click-to-lock pen cap that automatically aligns in place as soon as you hold it near either end of the pen.

However, it isn’t simply the use of magnets which makes the Arc Pen delightful, but rather a combination of design and engineering. The pen comes with a deceptively simple form, machined out of aerospace-grade aluminum. Its cylindrical design is punctuated by a chamfer, running along the length of the pen on both sides. The two chamfers prevent the pen from rolling on flat surfaces, as well as a visual indication of the pen/cap alignment. The pen’s internal magnet follows this chamfer, snapping into place perfectly every time. In order to open the pen too, one must simply break the alignment by twisting the cap ever so slightly, and the internal magnets push the pen and cap apart. The cap fits on the rear of the pen too, aligning magically every time so as to never visually break character.

The Arc Pen ships fitted with a Pilot Juice Up gel refill which provides crisp, confident, unbreaking lines, making it ideal for sketching concepts, creating schematics, or even noting down ideas and penning proses. The refills come in a choice of 3 colors and 3 line-widths, while the Arc Pen remains compatible with all Pilot-style G2 refills. Equipped with a lifetime warranty, each Arc Pen comes with an all-metal construction without using any glue or plastic parts in its assembly. A variant of the Arc Pen comes with a full-body ruler cap for artists, engineers, and architects… and for true haute-stationery aficionados, the Arc Pen even has a robust all-titanium variant, lasting you not one, but multiple lifetimes!

Designer: stilform

Click Here to Buy Now: $55 $78 (29% off). Hurry, only 7/855 left! Over $135,00 raised.

Arc Pen – World’s First 2-Sided Magnetically Aligning Pen

A Minimalist gel ink pen with a magnetic self-aligning mechanism and an innovative ruler cap.

The gel pen has a magnetic mechanism on both ends of the pen. Its anti-roll chamfered surfaces along the pen body get aligned perfectly all by itself.

What is Special About the Arc Pen

It clicks, it attracts, it aligns – A minimalist gel pen that always presents its best self. The magical precise alignment is realized through strong 4-pole neodymium magnets on both ends of the pen. There are no visible threads! Simply twist the cap open and start your creative journey.

Innovative Ruler Cap – Upgrade the stilform Arc to the alternative version with an integrated ruler cap and declutter your desk space!

The inch and centimeter scales are perfect for quick sketches, technical drawings and precise measurements.

See the alternative Ruler Version in action below:

Unique anti-roll surface – The chamfered surface along the pen body works as an effective anti-roll design. It guarantees a good grip, when you are holding the pen and writing with it.

Titanium & Aluminum – All parts are precision-machined from high-grade titanium or aluminum. These superb materials are well known for the extremely high durability and exceptional light weight. The matte surface of the Arc in Titanium is especially resistant against scratches due to a special PVD-coating and delivers a fine satin feeling.

Quality made in Germany – The all-metal construction functions without any glue or plastic parts. The team works closely with the advanced assembly facility in Germany to ensure a long-lasting product and smooth production schedule.

Best Gel Ink Refill – The stilform Arc is armed with the renowned Pilot Juice Up refill (LP3RF) that writes extra smoothly and offers great water and fade resistance. Combined with the Ruler Upgrade, the refill makes the stilform Arc the perfect companion for creatives, architects and illustrators.

You are provided the Pilot Juice Up refill (LP3RF) in 3 different colors and 3 line widths (0.3mm, 0.4mm & 0.5mm). You can also equip the stilform Arc with any other Pilot-style G2 refill.

Detachable clip – Equip the Arc with the exclusively designed metal clip by simply sliding it on. The clip has a 1mm robust arm but a soft heart – it is added with a textile layer to protect metal exterior of the pen body.

The Durability Test

Durability tested by dropping the Arc 85 times! Watch the video above. Spoiler: The magnetic mechanism still works perfectly afterwards.

Watch Review from Superbacker Tim Chuon @brollandboardgames:

Look Book

The Arc comes with a Ruler Version, the Titanium Arc sports a natural matte PVD and when encased in a new pouch made from genuine leather, it stays protected. The colors include Rose Moon, Comet Grey, Night Sky and Warp Black.

Click Here to Buy Now: $55 $78 (29% off). Hurry, only 7/855 left! Over $135,00 raised.

Two-time ASP Longboard World Champion Joel Tudor spearheads the annual Hawaiian event

In the longboard community, the money’s not the primary concern. This is according to someone who should know better than just about anyone else: Joel Tudor, a two-time ASP Longboard World Champion. “There’s not a lot of opportunity and a lot of the kids that you see will be riding the same board for a year or two years and it’ll be beaten to shit and often covered in duct tape, so that was where the name came from,” he explains, when asked about the impulse to create the Vans Duct Tape Festival in 2010.

What is the duct festival? “Eh, we kinda started as a tag-along event,” Tudor says, referencing the Duct Tape Invitational, which has contestants competing to create the best longboard. “So many of the guys and girls are making their own boards because if you want a surfboard and you don’t have sponsors, it’s cheaper to make it yourself—especially longboards because they’re so big and so costly.” According to Tudor, they can run from a couple of hundred bucks up to $1,200. “So you ask yourself, ‘Okay, pay all of this money or pay $250 and do it all myself?”

The Festival itself, held in O’ahu’s North Shore on the Pua’ena Point Beach Park, features internationally renowned surfers/shapers like Michael February and Nathan Fletcher who were on site to present their own-hand shaped, custom surfboards that will live on—and be available to rent—at the local surf shop. The event, which is open to the public, invites attendees to take these boards out on the water in an effort to remove the barriers between athlete and spectator. Iterations of the event have sprung up in other nations, including Portugal, France, Japan and more.

“To me, the Duct Tape Festival is the grassroots of grassroots, the heart of surfing, because Joel Tudor is to me a surf God,” says Steve Van Doren, whose father co-founded Vans in 1966. “He molded himself after the forefathers. It was put together to give a platform to longboard surfing,” a sport that faces “near extinction” according to the Vans website. The idea, according to Van Doren is simple: Pop up some tents, get a barbecue going, and get people to try out boards. What better way to fall in love with longboarding than to try it out on some of the best boards out there, crafted by those those who know the waves best.

For Tudor, who’s pleasantly interrupted for handshakes and high fives every few sentences, surfing is not a sport, but rather a lifestyle, an ethos he feels strongly about instilling in others. “There’s a million different sports, but none of them are quite like this. There’s something nomadic about having a life that chases the waves and the ocean and the wind. Snow is close to it, right, but snow’s a pretty snooty, rich thing. You gotta have all this shit like lift tickets just to get you up. Surfing you can kinda come from nothing and find your way to it and get your first board at a thrift store and start toward that infectious lifestyle. It’s an attraction beyond athletic.”

Another key feature of the festival is the presence of grommets, commonly referred to as groms, which are surfers under the age of 16—most of them with more surfing experience than many of the attendees twice their age. If you don’t have that younger group, then there’s no future for what you’re doing, says Tudor. “All of these guys are worth celebrating. They’re cool as shit. And within the world of surfing, there’s not a lot of people original like that. And they’ve inspired the kids underneath them. They’ve put a lot of legwork in and it’s nice to see that that work will carry on. It’s not a monetary thing, you see. Money’s not the goal at all. It’s the inspiration of a next generation that’s picking it up. That’s the goal.”

Images courtesy of Vans

Pulled from James Blake’s Grammy nominated 2019 album Assume Form, “I’ll Come Too” details love and its boundlessness. From following a lover to a new city to promising to be better for the sake of the relationship, the repetition of lyricism—sometimes metaphoric and other times literal—reinforces a familiar plot. But, rather than pair the song with an expected music video, Blake tapped Matt Meech, an editor for the award-winning shows Planet Earth and Blue Planet, to direct. Meech tells the tale of unrequited love using footage of a real penguin and albatross. It becomes utterly moving—and nearly tear-jerking when the lonesome penguin stands by as the albatross takes flight.

This non-toxic play mat from Cream Haus folds up into a teepee for hours of fun. The soft construction means you don’t have to worry about the sharp edges found on similar items designed for wee ones. And it can lay flat for tumbling or other play before folding up to slip behind a couch or under a bed when not in use.

Following our post on this bicyclist-friendly resting point at stoplights in Sweden…

Image credit: Ryder

…several of our readers sounded off with opinions. Designer Jason Livingston wrote “In discussing this same photo with some bike commuting design colleagues, we concluded that this object was likely placed here not to allow people this comfort, but to prevent them from performing the same maneuver using the pole in front (which would put much of the bike, in not the rider, into traffic).”

I hadn’t considered that that might be its origin (and I suppose, sadly, we’ll never know) but it surely seems possible. You can picture a designer seeing a cyclist hanging onto a pole with his front wheel in traffic, and thinking “What would be a better solution?”

Reader Björn Bengtsson brought up another benefit of the object: It “Actually helps you take off quicker when green. Making more people able to cross before it’s red again.”

Reader Hans Marvell provided a helpful photo of an alternative, larger, potentially multi-person design found in Denmark:

Image credit: Hans Marvell

“They make a big difference when you have a load on your bike such as a child in a seat or cargo bags on both sides of the rear wheel,” he writes.

On top of that, I assumed another benefit would be that this could accommodate more than a single rider, but Marvell points out that human behavior obviates that. “The longer ‘bench-like’ design can be used by up to three cyclists, but usually the first cyclist who arrives at the stand takes up the whole space by parking in the middle.”

An idea for a design modification to fix this? “Maybe three smaller stands are better than one big long rail,” Marvell suggests. “Either way, this is a really good idea as it also prevents pedestrians stepping out on the bike path to cut a shortcut across the road at a junction.”

That last one sounds like a potential lifesaver; when I was still living in NYC and Citibiking everywhere, you’d constantly see pedestrians–faces in their phones, of course–stepping directly into a bike lane without looking.

Which do you all prefer, the Danish or Swedish design? I think both have their merits, but I feel certain that the Swedish design wouldn’t work in NYC; for one thing, I can see skateboarders constantly grinding on this thing–and groups of them using it as a bench on breaks, their boards and legs sticking out into the bike lane.