Designphil (headquarters: Shibuya, Tokyo, president: Yuri Aida) is a design company that inspires greater enjoyment of daily life and suggests new ways to live through design. Designphil’s MIDORI product brand has just won an award at Good Design Award 2025, hosted by Japan Institute of Design Promotion (JDP) for its popular Box Cutter and Lens Ruler.

There are many cases in our daily lives, particularly for visually impaired elderly people, where text is too small to read easily. This product’s appeal lies in its user-friendliness: it can be used intuitively by placing it on the page in the same way as a standard ruler, allowing sufficient magnification of the section the user wishes to read. This eliminates the need for a lot of movement of the hand and eye, reducing the strain that occurs when using a conventional magnifying glass. The judges were impressed by the way the transparent, simple design is balanced with easy visibility to provide unobtrusive assistance in users’ reading experience.

The cutter can be optimized to three types of box cutting—breaking down, resizing, or opening—by changing the placement.
(1) Breaking down: Users can press the groove of the main unit into the edge of the box and pull the unit forward along the edge for easy cutting. Enables cardboard boxes and milk cartons to be broken down smoothly.
(2) Resizing: Users can resize boxes by cutting the edges to fit the contents and making shallow cuts in the sides to fold them down.
(3) Opening: Users can tilt the main unit forward to cut along the tape holding the flaps of a box together.

The safe design requires the user to push down a slider on the front to expose the blade, and the blade retracts automatically when the slider is released, ensuring that the blade is not left exposed. Minimal force is needed to push down the slider, enabling stress-free operation during box-cutting work that requires force. A magnet on the back allows storage on the refrigerator or a metal desk or door so that users can grab it easily when they need it. The box cutter comes in three colors: black, khaki, and beige.

The blade is made from an extremely durable, rust-proof ceramic material. This material is sharp, enabling smooth cutting without unnecessary force. The blade can be removed and replaced with Midori’s spare box cutter blade (suggested retail price: ¥638 including tax) to extend the life of the box cutter.

15cm scale lines and a magnifying lens all in one ruler. The whole of this thick semicircular ruler is a magnifying lens that can magnify a full line of text. The text is magnified by about 1.5 times, making small text easier to read. A colored guide line is included to distinguish each line of the text. Users who struggle to read small text can keep this product in their pen case so that it’s on hand when they need to use the magnifying lens.

In addition to the standard scale lines for measuring length and drawing straight lines, a ground point scale is provided for accurate measurement of height or depth. UV silk printing is used to prevent the scale lines from rubbing off through wear.

The ruler comes in two colors: clear for a high level of transparency and yellow to match highlighter pens. The guide lines to distinguish each line of text are red on the clear ruler and purple on the yellow one, providing an attractive accent to the design.

The Good Design Awards are an initiative to continue the Good Design product selection system by evaluating and promoting Japan’s leading designs. Now a global design award that many companies and organizations both inside and outside Japan compete for, the Good Design Awards are held every year to improve people’s quality of life and tackle social issues and themes. The “G Mark” that winners display is viewed with fondness as a symbol of outstanding design.
http://www.g-mark.org/