New stuff on Coroflot!

Heyyyyooooo!

Been feeling like I let my portfolio get a bit dusty this past year, when I've had a bunch of stuff hit the shelves last fall! I'll continue to update my work, but for now I've at least got a bit of the Thomas the Tank Engine stuff up on coroflot. I'm really proud of these trains cause they're just so simple! They are designed around the Mega Bloks mini system and are compatible with each other for great mix and match options!

Here comes a Thomas/James Hybrid delivering Brobee's Pants just in timeee! Phewf!! That was embarrassing!

Ena Macana

Inspired this morning by Ena Macana. She takes vintage toys and transforms them into terrific fashion accessories! Her Barcelona studio store is a treasure trove of unique peices...

"Whenever you come to visit, you will hardly find the same accesory twice.
It is a place where you don´t seek, you find. "

muji, another reason why I love the Japanese!

muji is like the Japanese version of IKEA, only, dare I say it... BETTER! I first heard of them when I saw the project they did with LEGO featured on designboom.

Similar to their furniture, clothing, housewares, and beauty products, muji's toy designs are innovative, thoughtful, beautiful and over the top charming! I definitely plan to stop by on my next NYC trip!

The thing that really blows me away however, is that on their website they use product video demonstrations that actually show the item in USE, instead of static photographs. Brilliant!

Fisher Price Sing-a-ma-jigs!

How cute are these new stuffed toys from FP??! They're called Sing-a-ma-jigs and they sing harmonies together! So simple, so effective... The best part is that they have hair elastic bands for mouths... adorable.

Play N Go Table Featured on ABC News Hottest Toys

Gee WHIZ it's cool when this happens! Check it out! The first product shown in the segment is the Play 'n' Go table that I worked on with an amazing team at Mega Bloks!

Here's the link: Hottest Holiday Toys

Put your hands in the AIRR!!! CHEYA!

Full Circle!

This week, my incredibly talented friend Matt Forsythe blogged about my work on Drawn.ca! Which is particularly neat since Drawn is where I learned about Yo Gabba Gabba in the first place.

Here was the original Yo Gabba Gabba entry that had me running through the office, begging to work on that license if ever we had the opportunity! Thanks Matt!!!

Part 4 - DJ Lance's Boombox Dance Party Times!!! :D

Rebuild DJ Lance's Boombox into a crazay DANCE PARTY!! Here are the specs!
- The boombox plays 4 hit Yo Gabba Gabba songs (YGG Theme song, Party in my Tummy, I like to Dance, Freeze Tag)
- You can add 'plex FX' to the music (robotic sounds), like a real DJ!!
- The speakers are spinning dancefloors to get the party going
- Inside the boombox is storage for all your blocks
- Brobee and Foofa are dancing, buildable figurines that can be mixed and matched!
- Comes with lots of blocks for building and rebuilding
- Just plain AWESOME!!!


Here's the original ideation sketch for the product below! The ideas for this entire product line came pretty quickly and easily since there was so much good content to get inspiration from. The characters were obviously designed with toys in mind, and the story lines and music throughout the show easily lend themselves to exciting toy ideas.


After the first sketch was approved, we moved forward with illustrator files that determine the parts, scale, color schemes, etc. I use these images for protopacks to give to model makers, as well as for my own reference, printing out the files and making foam models to figure stuff out.


Here's one of those foam core models that was used to figure out a lot of the preliminary details.
After the preliminary design is approved, we move on to 3D modeling and begin the development of parts for production. These are some of the early renderings of the boombox!

"Listening and dancing to music is AWESOME!!!"


You can get this toy and the others featured on my blog, online at toysrus.com! Here's the link!

Part 3 - Plex's Tour Buggy / ROCK SHOW!!!

Roadie Plex and Rocker dude Muno on their way to the punk rawk show!

Get to the venue, unpack the gear and rebuild into a sweet concert!!

Here's another rebuild!! All that's missing is some dry ice and pyrotechnics!

"They're here to bring ROCK n ROLL, to the KIDS!!!"

So, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the goings on of Gabba Land and its inhabitants, Plex, the musical robot, has a drivers license and drives his friends around in his buggy...

Thus came the inspiration for a buildable Plex Buggy.. but not just ANY buildable Plex buggy, a Plex TOUR buggy, that rebuilds into a rock 'n' roll show. Woooo! It also comes with dancing, buildable figurines, Muno and Plex!

Here's the original ideation sketch:


After the sketch was created, I worked in Illustrator to figure out the pieces, scale, and colors of the toy. Here are the plan views of the first designs of the toy:

These illustrator files were then used as instructions to send to model makers to make prototypes, and then I also used it to make foam core prototypes! These protos helped us determine the play pattern, costs, technical issues, etc.



After these preliminary models, we begin with the 3D file work, and through a design process of testing, engineering, prototyping, we end up with a final toy design!

Here's the link to pick it up online!

Part 2 - Buildable Gabba Land!

Welcome to GABBA LAND!!! This is where all the magic, dancing, eating, playing, loving and learning happens. So it only seemed natural that we would somehow create inexpensive, buildable, collectible, Gabba Land skus! Here's the original ideation sketch that I drew at the beginning of the project... The design pretty much stayed the same except we did end up making the blocks more generic (rectangular, with no curves), and added more figurines (friends in each world) as part of the play.


They each represent a world of one of the characters, come with a 'friend' from that world (the rock friend, flower friends, Brobee's party in his tummy, and the media player), and best of all, one of the dancing, buildable figurines!

Muno!!! ...in his natural environment

Foofa! <3

Brobeeeeee!!!

Toodee! When she doesn't tell on you, she's AWESOME!!

These should retail for about $9.99 US each, and when you collect all four you can build and rebuild crazy environments... For people who love Blocks and Yo Gabba Gabba, these are way fun! You can get them online here!

Part 1 - Yo Gabba Gabba!!! Figurines

"Let's DANCE! Put on your red shoes and dance the blues!!!"
The figurines swing their arms and 'dance'!

Mix'n'Match the figs! Super silly fun times!

We wanted to do something INCREDIBLE with the figurines, and since the show is centered around dancing and music, I sketched up this loose drawing of DANCING FIGS!!! The licensors also wanted buildable figs, so we added that feature in as well... SO FUN! Kids can mix and match Muno, Brobee, Foofa, Toodee and Plex, and make them dance by pushing the posts on the tops of their heads... Way fun!


Christopher Wong (one of my best buddies!!) also worked on these figs, and did the first passes at the design of them within the mini tram (construction block specs). You can see their breakdown above! The people at YGG were awesome, and directed the overall look of the figs.. we'd send them updates and they let us know if eyes were in the right place, brobee's unibrow was too thick, etc...etc..
Here are some of the final working, clay sculpts of the figs that we got before we went to production of the injection molds... Here are the final designs!!


I should probably mention that the original inspiration was from the Ghostbusters toys that I used to play with as a kid.. you know, the ones with the 'fright feature' where you lift their arms and their eyes bug out and their hair stands on end? Well, I was like, "How can we make the figurines cool like that??" Not sure that we achieved such a huge cool factor as those figs, but it was definitely a good place to start.

Yo Gabba Gabba Product Line

It's about time that I did this post! Here are the final products for the Yo Gabba Gabba line of toys that I worked on last year! I'll be doing some more posts soon about the design process too!



You can see more pics of these on my coroflot, here!

Daily Do!

Ben visited this weekend! This is a sketch from an animation we tried to do on our rainy Sunday. Truth be told, we're not very good at animation...

I'M LIZZING!!!!

WOW. I don't know if anything else could top this... But the Yo Gabba Gabba peeps sent us this pic today of Kenneth and Donny Lawson (the head page), holding baskets of the toys I designed!! The Boombox, Plex Tour Buggy and a couple of Fig Packs!!!!

WOWWOWOWOWOWOWWOWWW :D!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Blog about a Blog! "Beats and Bloks in a BOX!!"

EXCITING!!! The other night I found THIS on the Yo Gabba Gabba News Blog! So happy to see that the Boombox I designed with MegaBloks was featured! We were all so excited about the way it turned out, and I was so happy to see how many of the show's fans were excited about the product! The YGG fan page on facebook was full of 'likes' and comments about it! I can't imagine getting to work on a more fun project... I only hope more opportunities come my way!


Here's the link!

The world's ugliest ride-on.

A coworker found this and we all can't stop laughing at how ugly and scary this is!

Mega Bloks Play 'n' Go Table

Check it out! Another product to finally hit the shelves, so now I can blog about it! As a toy designer, I'd LOVE to share with you, all the neat things I get to work on... but alas, I can never publish anything until it's released to market. Most of my blogging will be in 6 month intervals when things get released... I'll have some more blogs coming super soon about the Yo Gabba Gabba product I developed, though! I can't wait for those entries...

Anyhow, here is the Play 'n' Go Table! This table combines building fun for kids as well as storage and portability for mom and dad. Through focus groups and testing, we learned from parents that most preschool tables that are currently on the market are too big and bulky, and can't easily be hidden away. Because of this, we wanted to create a table that could easily be stored and transported, with storage, and that would still be fun for kids. You can get your very own here (shameless plug)!

(PS.. that's my niece Kiki (Kiera) with the pigtails in the pic above! :D)

More after the jump, either on my Flickr or on my Coroflot!

Outdoor Living Project - 4th Year Uni Easter Eggs

Me and my close pal, Albert Kwon worked on a project for Umbra in our 4th year (I can't believe that was 2 and a half years ago)... The project was to design a product for an outdoor, urban environment, and we decided to do a space divider or as we liked to call it, a 'spatial mediator' (students are full of silly jargon). Just wanted to show some highlights from our boards that we presented to the clients...

We presented the four initial concepts in a pdf presentation where you had to scroll down the facade of a building to see the concepts on each balcony. In the original design, there are several more information bubbles that show the designs of the products more in depth. You can see those here.

Here is an easter egg on one of our boards... notice the guys tshirt? Albert drew him and i made him give him a GB t-shirt!!!1!!

And then this beauty... hahah! We wanted to do a project involving STOOPS so badly, but we were talked out of it by our advisor. We wanted to bring the same feeling that a stoop has, to a balcony! In retrospect, our advisor was right in saying that "stoops are STOOP-id!!" (thats a quote!), since the very essence of a stoop is that you are in the middle place of private and public dwellings, where you meet your neighbours, and watch the world go by. No product on any balcony can really recreate this, except maybe concrete stairs on everyones balconies. All this to say, we threw a dude eating BBQ chicken on a stoop as homage to our original idea. YES!

Albert did the amazing characters and I did the rest of the boards shown here.

Here's the rest of the project on my flickr!

2009 Snow Sculptures

This is also a super overdue post... particularly since we're in the middle of a heat wave right now in Montreal.

Anyways these are the concept sketches that I did for the Winterlude Festival in Ottawa, Ontario this past year! These sculptures were featured in Jacques Cartier park... I drew the images for the client, who then gave them to the sculptors to recreate. They did an amazing job interpreting my drawings! I always LOVE working on the snowsculpture projects.

more images here on my flickr!