Even if the majority of photos taken ultimately live on the Internet, there is still a place for them in the home. Sure, Facebook and Instagram let us swarm the globe with the everyday, but special moments deserve a more prominent and permanent location.
To make framing and hanging photos an experience that rivals hitting a Share button in its ease, Montreal-based design studio Toboggan created FLIXI. Its Wall Snap system — comprised of four springy feet, double-sided adhesive tape, and an integrated level (perhaps overkill) — lets users quickly search for a place on a wall, ensure a level frame, and set it all under a minute. Slowly pulling on a pull tab within detaches it from the wall without a trace. FLIXI frames come in a variety of sizes (4X6, 5X7, and 8X10) and colors, all of which can also stand upright or connect together to make a two-sided hinged frame or a mobile. The many options FLIXI offers naturally lends itself to many display ideas, all of which can be worked out online through the Web app Toboggan offers.
In its campaign video, users can see how their photos will look inside FLIXI frames and experiment with different arrangements without assembling a single frame. Rewards range from a single FLIXI at $13 to a set of 10 for $144, all featuring an expected ship date of February 2016. Toboggan is hoping to raise $48,300 by July 9th, 2015.
Recently, photo frames have tended towards the more connected, digital variety, with products like the Fireside and Pigeon offering features like cloud storage, automatic gallery management, sharing across devices and more. Those features inevitably come with more headaches, though, and FLIXI’s clever solution to what can be an otherwise tedious process. While it doesn’t do much to ensure uniform picture spacing or alighment, It shows that ingenuity hasn’t hit a wall when it comes to placing photos there.