Looking back, moving forward

2018 was an eventful year for MINIMAL. We engaged in exciting new partnerships, saw a number of our designs hit the market and win awards, and made our mark across a diverse range of industries. Our team approaches design holistically—bridging the gaps between product design, engineering, UX/UI, branding, and strategy—to create meaningful impact and build value for our clients.

Thank you for your continued support and positivity. We look forward to continuing the journey with all of you.

Our goal for the Allsteel A8 was to create a height adjustable work station that balanced the user’s emotional needs with their functional needs, while still allowing ease of use for facilities managers and IT professionals. Our design and engineering team collaborated with Allsteel from start to finish. We had the opportunity to speak with users to understand their needs, collaborate in the creation of full-scale prototypes, and guide the design to the end.

The Ava Fertility Tracker 2.0 is the second generation fertility tracking bracelet from Ava. The bracelet is worn while sleeping and tracks seven physiological parameters including skin temperature, resting pulse rate, breathing rate, HRV and sleep, enabling women to better understand their body and know when the time is right to conceive. MINIMAL collaborated with Ava Women to design this update to the original Ava bracelet, as well as its packaging.

The G3PRO is Theragun’s third generation, professional-grade, portable treatment device. As a product designed for both professional use and self-treatment, weight distribution and the ability to shift the position of the device for different modes of use were of critical importance. MINIMAL designed a closed-loop, trilateral form that balances ergonomic acuity with an iconic design language that allows for several grip positions.

MINIMAL teamed up with House of Marley to design Liberate Air, their first truly wireless earbuds, and the No Bounds family of Bluetooth speakers. Created with mindfully sources materials, they stay true to House of Marley's mission of creating Earth-friendly and socially responsible products.

Winston is a hardware device that protects your privacy by filtering out malicious tracking code from your internet activity, keeping you safe from unwanted data collection and advertising in a way that no browser plug-in could ever do. We worked with Winston to design their brand and visual identity, hardware device, packaging, website, and engineering—a perfect example of MINIMAL’s holistic approach to design.

Products in the defense category are rarely, if ever, touched by industrial designers, which leaves a void where a well-designed product could be the icon of the industry. MINIMAL and FLIR’s engineering teams took on this challenge and created the G510 and R440: chemical and radiation detection instruments designed to be taken into the field.

We were honored to bring home two gold IDSA International Design Excellence Awards for the TURF Acoustic Tile System and HBF Fulton Rocker. Both projects were inspired by personal experiences and are part of MINIMAL’s growing portfolio of self-incubated and shared-risk strategic partnerships, which makes it even more rewarding to know that they will be showcased in a permanent collection at The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation.

MINIMAL also won a 2018 Good Design Award gold award for our design of the Üllo wine purifier and aerator. We set out to design and engineer an inclusive line of products that appeal to everyone from the casual wine drinker to the trained sommelier. The design and product architecture should allow wine drinkers to purify and aerate an individual glass or an entire bottle through the filter without disrupting the mood or atmosphere of the experience.

Last year we were lucky enough to host hundreds of designers and industry professionals at our Chicago studio for MINIMAL's 10th NeoCon event with our partners at TURF, and we were thrilled to have fellow innovator and Crave co-founder Ti Chang park her Pleasure Factory Airstream in our garage as part of her company’s cross country tour to bust the myths and stigmas around female pleasure.

And finally, 2018 saw the partnership of Scott Wilson, MINIMAL, and Cresco Labs and our efforts to elevate their entire consumer experience as one of the largest vertically integrated, multi-state cannabis companies in the U.S.

IDC 2019

This year's International Design Conference is being held in Chicago from August 21 to 23. Interested in partnering with MINIMAL on an event at our design studio? Let's talk!