Japanese design firm Nendo is not only brilliant at creating beautiful products in any medium, but they are also good at getting featured on Minimalissimo.

As a collaboration with Italian furniture maker Glas Italia, Nendo has created a series of three frosted glass tables for this year’s furniture fair in Milan. Although the description might sound simple, the overall aesthetic is much more complex due to the gradient hues of these tables’ edges. During the process of making these sculptural objects, bright strips of colors were applied onto the outer rims of each frosted panel, giving a visuality of neon tubes running along the seams of the cubes. Nendo lets us know:

What is more, the reverse side of the frosted glass was printed with a pattern to make it look as though the same colors were blurred on the glass surface.

That explains the name Soft. The dialogue between the pattern and the edge’s gradient is cleverly tailored to illusorily imply that these tables are glowing softly from the inside.

One of the things that I absolutely love about Nendo is their design philosophy which challenges the way that we understand materials. By minimally designing and tweaking small elements with great care, they are able to achieve results with grand effects that I can’t help but wondering, how do they keep doing it?

Photography courtesy of Kenichi Sonehara.