My friend Chris, a chef and restaurant owner, has aspirations to add to his food lineup - a donut shop. I created a few potential looks and names for his vision.
My brother, an avid home brewer, asked me to create a company mark and label visuals for his newly formed company, 561 Brew Co. For his first two competition-ready brews, conveniently named “ONE” and “TWO”, we landed on an abstract boxed letter skeleton on which I hand-built a colored mosaic interior for each.
An ex-colleague of mine reached out and asked if I could help his company, ZOKU, fine tune positioning for an upcoming launch of their new hydration water bottles. Over the next week, I created a series of concepts that ranged from ad campaigns, language, URL look & feel, and potential product stories. The following are sketches that I shared with ZOKU throughout the process.
I joined the Holiday Inn team to bring their new brand guidelines to life. Along with about 10 of my colleagues, I headed down to Atlanta, GA to do a full scale build out of hotel vignettes in a local basketball gym. The prototype was to be built in order to bring consumers thru the experience as well as tour IHG executives through their future look & feel. The team, extremely resourceful due to the distance from our workshop, built the entire prototype using foam core, printouts, and slightly altered elements from the local IKEA. The following is a time lapse video shot over the 4 day build out......
Over a holiday break I had a series of dreams about plastic army men sets that I had when I was a young boy. I used to play with them for hours and hours. I couldn't figure out why I was having these dreams but I decided to DO something with them - I went to the toy store, bought a few sets, and built a few visions that came from my dreams.
During a project for General Electric, I developed a concept for an energy monitoring system. Instead of getting caught up in the data of energy usage, I designed a small box that would be placed in the home that had one basic interaction - when your bill reached a certain predetermined dollar amount, a small bird would light up and chirp.
While working at IA Collaborative, we did quite a bit of work for SC Johnson. One of the brands we touched was Glade. BTW - Air fresheners and scent products are the bane of my existence. They asked us if we could redesign a couple of their products. We believed they needed more than that so we designed a new product lineup for them.
Sonim, a rugged mobile phone manufacturer, approached MNML to design new consumer models. Inspired by a couple of my lusts, Defender 90's and Bell & Ross watches, I designed this concept. Rendering: Scott Wilson
Don't ask me why exactly but I'm fascinated with the font DIN. So fascinated actually that I inked my body with a portion of it. Using the DIN "0", I created a font by only allowing myself to remove elements of the numeral in order to create letters.
I joined the Koss team for a few days to lend a helping hand. My task - quickly refresh the iconic Porta Pro On-Ear headphones. Rendering and modeling: Jerry O'Leary.
I had the privilege to mentor one of the most interesting and talented designers that I've ever met - Zachary Hobbs. I wanted to try some new things out with him - one being a welcome letter that was written expressly with his unique personality and skill set in mind.
Microsoft, a staple of MNML Studio’s business, dropped an old-school prduct design program on the team in the Fall of 2007. The job? Take the Microsoft XBOX controller, well tested and documented by hardcore gamers and couch potatoes all over the world, and redesign it. Quickly. Microsoft was not planning to replace the controller. Rather they were interested in creating game type specific controllers that would be earned through the accumulation of gamer points on their popular XBOX Live aspect of their console. This first iteration of this concept would target first person shooter gamers. Bang. Bang.
The task for the team was to combine gun weaponry knowledge with controller placements and handling comfort for endurance gamers. The challenge being that the team was, let’s say, novices in the area of guns and shooting knowledge. The final concept, destined for launch in December of 2008, has it all—aluminum and glass-filled body housings, laser etched markings, hollowed trigger components, grip checkering, bolt action loading battery pack, black anodized controls and a glass-filled ABS Pelican carrying case.
Rendering and modeling: Jerry O'Leary
Hopefully every designer has at least a few people who inspire him to produce better and better work. That person for me is Naoto Fukasawa. Naoto, a staple in the design world for as much as what he produces as how he approaches problems, believes that the act of designing lies somewhere between the balance of our inner body forces (our thoughts, memories, our sense of humor) and outer forces in the world (what people do around us, what others have created, how people generally act).
In 2004, I was honored to be invited to take part in a design workshop lead by Naoto—Without Thought. Naoto elaborated on his design philosophy and approach while assigning us design challenges throughout. The culmination of the workshop was a design assignment for each of the twelve participants to be completed in the following weeks. The work, as in past workshops, would be assembled into a book and would tour museums, design shows and galleries. My concept, the Spinning Disc, examined the offen hidden beauty of the spinning compact disc and it’s likeness to the rotating blade of a table saw.
Everyone should have an experience like that.
