A friend of mine enrolled in the French Culinary Institute, using my apartment as a locker to store her gear since the school is nearby. The FCI gives students a complete set of cutlery and utensils packed into a traveling case. I eagerly pulled this case open to check it out, but find the design disappointing.
The multiple compartments are neat, and I like the choice of red interior fabric to increase visibility, but the one-size-fits-all mentality applied to the sleeves means certain objects fit snugly while others can work their way loose during travel. Still other objects have no dedicated space at all and simply clang about with other orphans in a compartment with no divisions.
I started casting about for a better-designed knife case and found many with pretty exteriors; but from a functional and interior perspective, even the rolls designed to fit all tools snugly seem to suffer from another design problem, stemming from the shapes of the knives themselves. Most of the knives have similar handles but very different blade sizes and shapes, as per their function. If you design a roll to hold knives by the blade, which obscures them, you're then looking at a series of more or less uniform handles, slowing down the selection process.
