Nerdmatic

We Make Our Toys DIY

10th Grade Student’s Work in Progress

The students are almost halfway done with the Ugly Doll Project!  The project, a warmup to a larger plush project, is really fun. The students design and construct their own Ugly Dolls.  We started with drawing different character design concepts, leveraging the design ideology of Ugly Dolls (draw quirky characters, make flat plush based on quirky characters).  Of course, there is much more to the Ugly Doll’s story, but for the sake of simplicity, we boil it down to “He drew characters on his letters, she made him a flat plush based on his drawings, and Giant Robot, a friend to both of them, started selling the plushes, leading to a bagillion dollar empire”.

Being the bastard that I am, I force my students to produce multiple iterations and colorways of their designs such that, by the end of the project, they have a real sense of ownership of their ideas and have developed them to the fullest of their ability. Naturally, they just want to go ahead with the first doodle and colorway that they drop onto paper, so there is a bunch of minor teeth pulling involved.

To alleviate this and take a short break from sewing, I found some AMAZING paper craft vinyl toy templates to play around with next week.  The majority of the templates on the site are the regular front, side, back, other side view you have when designing a toy, and are great for coloring, but not so much for putting something together.  Hidden amongst these designer toy templates are some nuggets of delicious by FWIS called ReadyMech.  Super-quick design & build action figure templates to make little designer armies with! Now, if you’re thinking, “Yeah, the little figure you can make with the ReadyMech template are cute and all, but I’m looking for a little function to go with my form”, definitely take a look at the papercraft pinhole camera templates they made for Corbis. They are amazing.

Another little bit of fun and genius from the Vinyltoys.nl site - the We Hate Glue arcade template.  Designed by James Marr, it’s a template to build a little arcade cabinet (80s style).  What’s really cool is that he held a design competition in 2007 for who could create the best one.  The results are great (my favorite is Alberto Carazo’s Black Floyd).

Finally, in a super tangential way, the We Hate Glue competition reminds me of the Design For Chunks competition from waaaaay back in the day.  If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if a plethora of super talented graphic designers went full blown creative all over airplane sickness bags, this is your answer.