LED Lights

There are some really amazing light fixtures being made these days that take advantage of not only the efficiency of LED technology, but the physical characteristics of LED bulbs and strips. LED bulbs can be isolated into tiny units or, when combined, can spread out in a line or over a wide area. No matter what, they offer characteristics that are flexible and adaptable to nearly any design situation.

Using the slender quality of the new T8 LED light tubes, which are similar to but smaller than fluorescent tubes, London-based designer Tomas Alonso has created the Mr. Light series of fixtures. Unlike a fluorescent tube, the new T8 tube doesn’t require a reflector shade and uses fewer components to power it, which means it’s more compact and therefore more flexible as a design element. Alonso’s fixtures occupy an interesting territory between floor lamp and furniture, and with his Mr. Light series (as the word “Mr.” suggests), he has created objects that are not only sleek and chic but have individual personalities of their own. Check out our LED light bars, maybe they will give you some lighting inspiration!

The Wa Wa floor lamp is a part of the recently developed Eco-Logic Light collection of LED lighting by the firm of Catellani & Smith, based in Bergamo, Italy. Designer Enzo Catellani had made a fixture that is a cross between a lamp and a wall projection, and it appears that you can adjust the individual LED bulbs to customize it! You could put it in a corner and point some of the bulbs toward each wall or create patterns on one wall using the spaces where the lights overlap.

Last year Johannes Dinnebier created what he calls the Dione, a ring lamp that comes in two sizes made of matte stainless steel or polished stainless steel with adjustable rings and LED bulbs. It looks like it has at least 100 LED bulbs but consumes only 30 watts of power. (Which, efficient as it is, still draws more power than our LED strip lighting: 5 feet of our Flexible LED Strips has 90 bulbs and consumes 7 watts.) His company  Licht im Raum (which means “Light in space”) is located in Germany and boasts all handcrafted items. You DIYers out there could definitely, with the help of some of our strip lights, take a cue from Herr Dinnebier and create your own fabulous suspension lamp.

Another fixture that incorporates the shape of the light cast from a bulb as a design element is the Let Art table lamp, which throws silhouettes on a transparent canvas and whose color and patterns can in fact be adjusted by the user. The Let Art lamp hails from Lucerne, Switzerland and the firm of Baltensweiler, under the roof of whose gorgeous studio all of the design, manufacture and marketing of their lamps takes place. Again, Elemental offers you the same technology used in this fixture in our line of full color LED products, from RGB strips, bars and tubes to DMX RGB controllers that give you the full range of custom lighting control.

Clearly all of these designers have been in some way inspired by the flexibility—in more senses than one—of LED technology, and also empowered to do more and think in broader terms by the adaptability of LED lighting to different needs and situations. And isn’t it great that you can have lamps that are eco-friendly and look cooler, too?