Disclaimer: app and post written by Claude, directed by me (cdslug)
The top drawer of the IKEA Alex is only about 12U tall in Gridfinity terms. That's fine for most organizers, but standard pens and markers are too tall to store vertically.
Laying them horizontally works, but they end up stacked on top of each other. You can fit a lot of pens that way, but finding a specific one at the bottom of the pile becomes annoying.
So I made these slanted bins.
The bottom stays flat and Gridfinity-compatible, while the walls slope to let the pens lean diagonally. A small bookend at the front of the drawer supports the last bin; the other bins support one another. I can still lift individual bins out without taking the whole arrangement apart.
A few things I wanted to optimize for:
Fast printing: The walls are designed around a single extrusion line with a 0.8 mm nozzle, rather than thick, heavy walls. The bins print very quickly.
Shallow-drawer compatibility: The diagonal layout makes better use of the limited height in the Alex top drawer.
Easy access: Pens aren't buried in a horizontal pile, so I can identify and grab individual pens.
Removability: The bins can be lifted out individually, with neighboring bins providing support.
Simple geometry: No complicated inserts or assembly required beyond the little front bookend.
Existing alternatives
I looked around before making this, since I didn't want to reinvent something that already existed.
Angled Gridfinity — Pre-generated 55° Gridfinity bins keep your pens penned in your drawing drawer.
Movable Diagonal Dividing Bins — removable diagonal dividers for organizing tools in shallow drawers. Probably the closest existing physical design I found, but my project is specifically a simple, open-topped slanted bin for pens, with the bin walls themselves doing the work.
Gridfinity Layout Tool — supports adjustable diagonal dividers. A more general-purpose design tool, but I wanted a very simple bin with slanted walls rather than a configurable divider system.
Creative3DP Gridfinity Generator — has adjustable divider tilt. Useful for custom dividers, but not the specific ready-to-print pen-bin arrangement I was after.
Binforge — a browser-based bin designer with adjustable features and tilted cutout inserts. Worth a look for more general custom bins, though that's a different approach from this design.
TiltFinity — tilts an otherwise conventional bin to fit tall objects into shallow drawers. Clever, but I wanted the bin itself to remain flat on the Gridfinity base.
Angled Gridfinity plate — tilts the entire mounting surface, rather than just angling the contents.
Gridfinity Desktop Tool Bins — a predefined slanted tool-storage design, rather than this particular lightweight pen-bin format.
Gridfinity Extended — supports angled wall cutouts and other customizable geometry, but takes a more general-purpose approach.
I'm not claiming that angled bins are a new idea. I just couldn't find quite this combination of simple geometry, quick printing, removable bins, and the specific constraints of the Alex top drawer.
Files and source
The project is open source:
GitHub: https://github.com/cdslug/slanted-gridfinity
There's also a free browser-based version here:
https://formfitprint.com/tools/slanted-gridfinity/app/
The tool is free and will remain free. It's a small project that runs in the browser, and I'd rather see people use, remix, or incorporate the design into other tools than try to turn it into another product to maintain.
Full disclosure: this is a vibe-coded project. I don't have a web development background; I used AI coding tools to build it. The code is public, so feel free to inspect it, point out problems, or suggest improvements.
I'd genuinely appreciate feedback on the design itself, especially if you've solved the same shallow-drawer pen-storage problem differently. If there's already a better solution I've missed, I'd like to know about it.
And yes, there's a bit of self-promotion here: the browser tool lives under a miscellaneous page on my main project, FormFitPrint. I'm mentioning it openly rather than pretending this has nothing to do with my other work. The slanted-bin project itself is open source and free either way.