The spark

The PlyForm Shelf was born from a familiar frustration: books constantly toppling over, shelves drowning in clutter. Jara Freund, a Frankfurt-based Industrial Designer at Braun Household, saw an opportunity to create something functional, beautiful, and simple. Her vision was clear: a modular shelving system built from just two components that anyone could assemble at home. The integrated, bent sheet metal bookends became the hero of the design, transforming a functional need into a striking visual statement.

"The design goal was a system that is easy to build on your own, delivering a minimal, beautiful storage solution."

Modular simplicity meets personality

At its core, the PlyForm Shelf solves a practical problem with elegant efficiency. The streamlined plywood base with soft edges provides the foundation, while the colorful bent metal bookends bring the personality. The color choices: vibrant primary blue, warm burnt orange, and sunny yellow, draw directly from the foundational palettes of the De Stijl and Bauhaus movements, evoking a sense of mid-century modern design.

The modular system makes the shelves versatile and scalable. Users can arrange the bookends as single supports or double, offset units, customizing their storage to match their current needs. It's shelving that grows and adapts with you.

Material considerations: function and contrast

Material selection was driven by simplicity and cost-effectiveness. Plywood offered the perfect balance of strength and affordability for the base. Bent sheet metal was chosen for the bookends because it's thin yet strong enough to prevent books from falling, while enabling the crucial modularity of the system.

Aesthetically, Jara aimed for graphic contrast: the warm, natural grain of plywood against vibrant metal colors. The result is a design language that feels both grounded and playful, inspired by clean, modern principles.

Jara’s Vizcom workflow

Fast explorations with the Modify Tool

Jara's process began with a quick napkin sketch — capturing the core idea before moving to refinement. She then further explored this idea in Procreate before uploading her enhanced sketch into Vizcom. This is where the design truly accelerated.

Vizcom became her rapid exploration lab, allowing her to instantly test materials, colors, and modular configurations through quick rendering. Modify enabled exploration of alternative shelf materials like glass and metal, while Variate let her experiment with different color combinations and bookend arrangements. The view changing tool was also essential for instantly rotating the sketch from front view to multiple perspectives, evaluating the design from every angle.

For the final presentation, Jara used these animations to showcase the shelf's proportions and modular functionality with minimal effort.

"The animation tool is so easy for quick results and really brings ideas to life, especially for demonstrating dimensions."

Wandering to find focus

The Modify tool led to some unexpected detours, including a whimsical exploration of a shelf visually growing out of a tree. While these experiments were fun, they ultimately confirmed the strength of the original PlyForm Shelf concept. It allowed Jara to return to the initial idea with renewed focus to fine-tune the core elements.

This iterative loop of exploring alternatives quickly, then refining what works highlights how digital tools can accelerate decision-making without sacrificing creative rigor.

From digital to physical

For Jara, the relationship between digital and physical design is becoming seamlessly iterative. The digital space is where you can use tools like Vizcom to rapidly explore, test materials, and refine concepts. The physical realm focuses on validation and fine-tuning proven ideas.

"Technology must serve the initial idea by making the whole process faster, cheaper, and simpler, ensuring the focus remains on designing good solutions."

In her view, the role of technology is to minimize design friction — reducing time spent on tedious rendering or complex prototyping and instead maximizing certainty that the design works aesthetically and functionally before production. This ensures what you build matches what you envisioned and close the gap between digital exploration and physical reality.

A note to fellow designers

Jara's advice is practical and direct: sketch fast to capture the core idea. 

Then leverage rapid visualization tools like Vizcom to instantly test materials, colors, and design alternatives, skipping long render times.

Jara believes that good design is achieved by finding a well-balanced solution that combines functionality, ease of use, aesthetics, and technical feasibility. She believes in creating products that bring joy and foster an emotional bond with users, inspiring them toward repair rather than replacement.

"Always prioritize simplicity, aiming for minimal components, and ensure your design is easy to manufacture (or 3D print) so your idea can actually become a tangible product."

Design: Jara Freund: jarafreund.de and @jarafreund
Location: Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Specialization: Interior Design
Visualization: Vizcom
Materials: Plywood base, bent sheet metal bookends

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