Lamy Aion rollerball pen

The latest addition to the Lamy range: the Aion (Greek for eternity) series of writing instruments, launched in 2017 and comprising of fountain pen, rollerball and ballpoint pen. The design comes from the British Jasper Morrison, who prefers the evolved archetypal and, therefore, simple, useful, proven, and affordable-for-everyone form to the spectacular design. The monolithic, ambitiously well-engineered, yet surprisingly affordable Aion lives up to this claim.

When tinkering mechanics and designers meet, conflicts are inevitable. If this is not the case, either marketing and product design have to cover up a lack of ideas and innovation, or both sides actually work together as equals from the start of product development, and technical and design development go hand in hand from the first sketch to the finished product. The Heidelberg-based stationery manufacturer Lamy, whose fountain pens and ballpoint pens have owed their form to collaborations with renowned designers since the 1960s - such as Gerd A. Müller, who presented the famous "Lamy 2000" in 1966, a style icon of the time; Mario Bellini, who combined classic and modern elements in the design of the "Lamy Imporium" in 2015; and Jasper Morrison, who coined the monolithic "Lamy Aion" in 2017. The writing instruments are manufactured entirely in Heidelberg; even the tools are made in-house, and each gold nib is inscribed by hand.