Skip to main content

12 of Yves Behar's best, craziest, and most profound designs

From laptops to door locks, a catalogue of the essentials

For all Yves Behar’s success as a designer, there’s no obvious Behar design signature — no figure or shape that repeats across his designs, no Designed by Yves lettering stamped into the plastic. Joseph Rosa, who curated Behar’s 2004 show at SF MOMA and is now director of the University of Michigan Museum of Art, says Behar’s designs are linked by “a quality of thinking.” As he put together the exhibition, Rosa was impressed by the way Behar brought together so many disparate partners in his work: people who worked in plastics, and furniture, and fashion. “He made these relationships to make the work take place,” Rosa says. “The older generation said, ‘I’m a designer, here’s a design, you figure out how to make it.’ Yves would figure out how to make it and then go find them the manufacturers to do it.”

Nicholas Negroponte chose Behar as his designer for the One Laptop Per Child project, which offers inexpensive laptops and tablets to children in developing countries. He says of Behar: “It is easy to imagine his place in history as the bridge between objects and behaviors, elegance and wit, well beyond form and function.” Here are a few of our favorite Behar designs.

Read our full profile of Yves Behar here!

Yves Behar gallery

1/16

Jawbone, Jambox
Introduced in 2010, the deceptively simple Jawbone Jambox launched the wireless speaker market.