Build Log · Industrial design
Machined, not moulded
Update: the shells are here (July 2026)
Promise kept. The first milled shells came back from the mill and out of the anodising bath, and the aluminium Newsboard in the photographs across the site is the real unit: assembled, anodised, and running on my desk. What follows is the post as I wrote it in May, when the aluminium was still a plan and the working unit was the black prototype. I'm leaving it exactly as written, because it's the record of what I said I would do.
A newspaper just sits there. It doesn't hum or glow, and it doesn't creak when you pick it up. I wanted the thing that holds the page to feel the same way, so I made a call about the production case that costs me more but sits better on a desk. I'm machining it, not moulding it.
A block, not a mould
The plan for production panels is to cut the shell from a single block of 6061 aluminium on a CNC mill, then anodise it. No plastic to flex, no clamshell seam that clicks when the room warms up. It comes out dense and cool to the touch, more like a piece of equipment than a gadget, and the metal doubles as a heatsink for the electronics inside.
Moulded plastic would have been cheaper and lighter, and I sketched in that direction for a while. But this thing is meant to sit in one spot for years, and I kept wanting it to feel like it would outlast the news on it. So aluminium won.
An honest note about the photos
One thing I want to be straight about. The working unit in my photos, and the CNC clip on the homepage, is the black prototype. The aluminium case is where I'm going, not what's in the box today. I'd rather show you the real unit that runs right now and tell you plainly where it's headed than stage a render and let you assume it's shipping.
[Note, added July 2026: the homepage this paragraph describes has since been redesigned and the clip is gone. The paragraph stands as written; it was true in May.]
So take the aluminium as a promise I mean to keep, and the black unit as where things actually stand. When the milled shells come off the mill, they'll show up here first, in the Build Log.