Just when you thought designer toys had explored all the various avenues possible in the ever-expanding and saturated industry, along comes Berlin-based Zeitgeist Toys. Absolutely beautiful and elegant designs utilizing a vast array of unique mediums, such as porcelain and pewter. Take that and add hand-painted watercolor flowers, total win. And I love how simple the base character designs are.

Even though I don’t spend a lot of coin on them, I love the designer toy scene and even tried my hand at designing my own line called The Orbinauts. But knowing that guys like Zeitgeist are out there, the bar has been raised far beyond. I sure would like to work with these guys.

Check out the official Zeitgeist Toys website, and swing over to this post on Beautiful Life for more shots of the line.

Last weekend I was rummaging around my parents basement looking for old toys or comic books left over from my childhood (I’m a nostalgic guy) and I stumbled upon quite the time capsule, my childhood sticker book. Sorry about the quality of the scans, it was difficult to get the coil-bound book to sit properly on the scanner.

As with many kids, my sticker book became a dumping ground for anything colorful that would stick to a page. So many awesome and obscure stuff at work here . . . Star Wars, A-Team, Gremlins, Michael Jackson, WWF stars, rockstars, M.u.s.c.l.e. characters, the list goes on. There’s a lot of hearts in there for some reason, I must have raided some leftover Valentines Day stickers :)

This isn’t art or inspiration by any means, but a pretty hilarious and adorable look back at the early to mid 1980s in sticker form. Enjoy.

PS. I went by Jimmy back then, hence the Jim stickers all over the place.

I have been checking out Magic Pony online for a few years now and finally got the chance to drop into their shop when I was in Toronto last week. Being from Halifax I have very limited access to hip designer toys and books, so it was quite a thrill to see what Magic Pony had in stock. All kinds of Kid Robot, Gama-Go, Tokidoki, etc. I was stoked to see some Droplets by Gav Strange on-hand as well.

Not only is the place a wonderful shop, but the entire back portion is an area to hold art shows.

Above is a shot of the few toy purchases I made, as I had to make great effort not to buy everything they had :) Shown are JamFactory’s Droplet, one of Pete Fowler’s Monsterism figures, a Gama-Go Yeti Qee and a blank Munny (oh, the possibilities there).

If you have the means I highly recommend dropping into Magic Pony, 694 Queen St. West in Toronto. And the staff are a super-friendly bunch.

Part VI: Stranger in a Strange Toyland

I left off with the Odyssey story as I was re-designing The Planet characters in an attempt to adapt them to a line of designer toys (see Part V: A New Start) which had me doing a lot of research into the hip and cool toy scene. As I stated before, I’ve wanted to design my own toys since I was 7 years old and had that dream re-kindled with the rise of Kid Robot and other designer toymakers a number of years ago.

After completing the updated wireframes I posted in the last installment I had a better idea of how The Planet figures might work in 3-dimensional form. So to move to the next stage I had to understand more clearly how an unpainted toy might look. My primary weapon for the Planet has always been vector, so I proceeded to add simple gradients to the wireframe to show highlight and shadow.

I was fairly happy with the pose and stature of the character at this point, so it was time to add some color based on my original concepts developed a couple of years prior…

The character was starting to come to life again, and now came the step I was most looking forward to. Naturally, I was thinking about the backstory while developing the new concept but it needed to be revised to add a bit more life to the idea. Having 3 characters with basically the same paint job worked for the original project idea, but wasn’t all that interesting when you start thinking toys. I needed more color and personality from the design to really make it work.

Here are some of my initial color experiments:

While designing at this stage I went to my local comic shop and picked up I am Plastic, a book chronicling the designer toy movement over the years. The book was a tremendous help in getting my creative juices going but one thing jumped out at me, bears. There was a huge number of cute toys in the book donning the same little bear ears my characters had, so I worked on changing the head design a little bit . . . something more dynamic.

Nostalgia naturally took over, and I started thinking about the toys I loved when I was a kid. Transformers, GI-Joe, He-man, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Voltron and a bunch of others in an attempt to figure out why those toylines caught my attention 25 years ago. They were all basic designs (with the exception of Transformers) with bright colors and distinctive symbols that differentiated the characters from one another. The Ninja Turtles had nothing more then different colored masks, pretty ingenious.

After a lot of sketching, color experimenting and writing, the toyline really started to take shape after I added a bit of logo design and color treatment to my simple concepts. Suddenly, even though the character model is the same across the board, the characters were separated from one another using simple colors and symbols yet worked as a team, just like those toys from my childhood. They now had personality, style, powers and most importantly . . . names!

It struck me soon afterward that the original title for this project ‘The Planet’, which I continued to call it wasn’t going to work anymore. It had grown outside of the original scope, was a little too vague, and I needed something that would reflect the team that Hydro, Ember, Chloro and Amour were part of. It needed to be dynamic, original, cosmic and most important of all it needed to be exciting.

I enlisted the help of Sameen, the wizard of words that she is to help me name this team of colorful little heroes, and she didn’t disappoint.

Next up, the final chapter: Part VII: Long Live the Orbinauts!

Need to catch up on the previous parts of A Signalnoise Odyssey? Be sure to check out:

Part I: A Long Time Ago
Part II: Rise of the Brothers
Part III: Here Come the Bad Guys
Part IV: Creating a Planet
Part V: A New Start

Part V: A New Start

We left off with all of the conceptual sketches, designs, identity and animation tests being complete on The Planet, and I was ready to move onto the arduous task of storyboarding and animating out all of the storylines I had written. The project had been fun until the thought of hours upon hours of animating in Flash was upon me, so things quickly fell apart by way of distraction and lack of time. This happened with many of my creative endeavors over the past 10 years, and the poor Planet project was no different.

Two years passed…

I had never lost track of The Planet and would occasionally doodle the little guys in my sketchbook, or re-open the Illustrator files to look at the motley crew I had designed. It was my first attempt at creating an ensemble cast so I was proud of them, and wanted to someday finish what I had started in one form or another.

Fast forward to last November, 2008. I had been running the Signalnoise Store for about 10 months and was exploring a few other project ideas for a change of pace, just to do something different from poster design. While outlining some ideas at my local watering hole one evening, The Planet popped back into my head. I started doodling the little characters once again and thinking of a way to re-open the project. It needed to be fun, something I could get excited about. Finally it hit me.

My good friends Chris and Sameen were big supporters of The Planet as a concept, and they saw all of the designs as I was creating them offering me feedback and encouragement the whole way. While sketching that night I remembered something Sameen had said to me very early on…

“I would love to have toys of these guys on my desk!”

Great idea, her thought really got me considering the designer toy scene and reminded me that I had wanted to design toys since I was 7 years old. So I started sketching out the main Planet characters from the perspective of a designer toyline to see what I could come up with.

The project had shifted, once again, into a direction I had very little experience in. Would The Planet translate into toys? Would they be cool enough to stand on their own without the help of a marketing stunt, like a cartoon or comic book? Could I maintain some of the back story I had developed along the way to add life to the little guys? I had lots of questions but a lot of fun research to do on what was happening in the global toy scene.

So after a lot of sketching, researching and pondering how I saw these little guys translated into a fully tangible toy, I opened Illustrator once again to start developing the concepts. My previous 2D designs wern’t going to cut it as a toy, so I had to re-think the overall design while maintaining some of the spirit of the previous concepts. Not exactly an easy task.

So after a few attempts, here is one of my vector designs where I was exploring character form and articulation.

Next up: Part VI: Stranger in a Strange Toyland

Need to catch up on the previous parts in A Signalnoise Odyssey? Be sure to check out:

Part I: A Long Time Ago
Part II: Rise of the Brothers
Part III: Here Come the Bad Guys
Part IV: Creating a Planet

Part IV: Creating a Planet

After deciding on a project direction for my little robots, and creating a cast of supporting characters, I started all of my pre-planning to create the additional elements I would need to adequately animate things. As I stated in Part III: Here Come the Bad Guys, I had a loose idea of how I wanted these characters to move but I had done no further work on it at that point. I have had very little character animation experience at the time, so the entire process was very new to me.

My first step was to create some models with different views so I would know what these guys looked like from a few angles. I had only created one point of view at this point and needed to explore some rough rotations, so I created these studies:

I wanted the animation to be pretty simple, where I could create loops, still frames and effects I could easily use with tweens in Flash. Nothing new, but I thought it would look nice seeing the scenes I created using such bold colors come to life.

In order to understand just how versatile these guys were, I did a couple of animation tests using the old and revised versions of the Brothers. I had to figure out how many pieces I would require when looping and rotating the characters, not all that different then the kind of animation used on my favorite web cartoon, Homestar Runner. So, I went about creating a few animated tests in Flash, click the images below to check them out:

After spending a few weeks prepping these character designs and animation tests, I set about solidifying back stories, mapping out more realized plot lines, and the daunting task of storyboarding out all of my ideas. I had to see how everything fit together before I started creating the animation for characters and backgrounds, so I spent a great deal of time roughing up thumbnails to analyze the flow and to make sure things moved intuitively.

This is where I hit an impasse. I was looking at the various animation tasks ahead and began to feel buried under a project that had started out on a small scale but had steadily grown as I explored the designs, the story, and my potential as an animator. As much fun as these characters and environments were to design, it was time to move on to the brooding production work that lied ahead . . . and it started to look a bit grim.

Next up . . . Part V: A New Start

Need to catch up on the previous parts in A Signalnoise Odyssey? Be sure to check out:

Part I: A Long Time Ago…
Part II: Rise of the Brothers
Part III: Here Come the Bad Guys

Part III: Here Come the Bad Guys

After creating the main character concepts (see Part I) as well as refining the design in vector format (see Part II), I was now at a critical point in the project which was mapping out exactly how I wanted it executed, in what medium, and what additional elements or characters I needed to create.

While designing, I had been loosely thinking about what the characters might look like in motion with different scenes, angles and poses. So I decided my little alien robots would be the lead characters in a little online animation project, maybe webisodes or a few short films. I would write and animate everything in Flash with some painterly backgrounds, an ambitious but fun little project I simply dubbed The Planet.

With that decision made, I set about writing some basic outlines for plots and stories I thought would be fun to work on. As the story grew I started adding more characters into the mix to foil, and be foiled by, the Brothers. These additional characters got further flushed out as I bounced ideas off of friends for plot ideas, and I eventually started the design process to see what these guys looked like.

The first was the main bad guy, the Coyote to my little Roadrunners, who I wanted to resemble a small spoiled child. His name is Ikaru:

Darth Vader had his Stormtroopers, and I wanted Ikaru to have his own posse of minions to do his dirty work:

And a race of super-intelligent robo-beings I simply named The Elders. Nobody knows whose side the Elders are on:

And what bad guy would be complete with a castle lair where he can plot the demise of his unsuspecting enemys? As a kid, I always loved how elaborate the villains’ hideouts always were, so here is a concept design for Ikaru’s castle:

My overall goal for creating a cast of characters was to not only make them unique from each other, but paying strict attention to how they looked as a whole. Styles can change, but they needed to look consistent as a group to enforce they were from the same universe, or planet in this case. I have been drawing cartoons my whole life, but with this project I was concentrating on applying my design abilities to keep things as consistant as I possibly could.

So at this point I had a more explored idea of the band of characters that inhabited The Planet, and a good idea of how they interacted to one another based on their archetypes. It was then time to move from the conceptual stage and into some pre-visualization and storyboarding based on the storylines I had come up with, and the trials that come with it.

Next up . . . Part IV: Creating a Planet

Part II: Rise of the Brothers

Here is the second part of A Signalnoise Odyssey, a series of posts where I’m outlining a project I started 3 years ago, the processes involved, and where the endeavor has led.

After drawing my little robot character for a week or so (seen in Part I: A Long Time Ago…), I naturally started to build up his personality in my head while expanding on some design ideas. I started thinking about his purpose, an environment he might reside in, and ultimately what his origins might be. I always saw him wandering about a forest on a distant planet, which sounds like a lonely existence for such a little guy, but more about that later.

My next step was to move into Illustrator and sharpen things up. I always do a first vector version quickly to nail down posture and expression in a very 2D manner using basic shapes, which led to this version of the little robot:

The funnest part of making this very rough version was messing around with the floral design on his torso. Offsetting it over his arm, imagining what it might look like in rotation, the variety of different styles I could pursue, etc. A lot of fun was to be had.

Over the next few days I started moving the design into something a bit more 3-dimensional still using strict vectors and basic shapes while continuing to experiment with floral designs from various dingbat sets I downloaded. As I said earlier, I imagined this little guy in a fairly lonely existence which is pretty unfair :) But through experimenting with the new design and different patterns, the Brothers were born.

I nudged the design more in the direction of my initial concept sketches while trying to maintain the posture, expression and general silliness of the flat vector version.

So what started as a little sketch had grown into a little band of forest-dwelling robots. But the obvious question was what did the forest look like? I wanted something simple to compliment the shapes of the Brothers, but it needed to be alien enough to make it distinctive from anything found on earth. I opted for the biggest different being expressed through color, which set me free to design a simple environment for the Orange Forest where the Brothers could peacefully go about their business.

I first painted things out quickly in Photoshop…

… then moved into Illustrator to clean things up and design the landscape around the characters.

I had been watching a lot of Samurai Jack at the time, and the Asian style Tartakovsky used for his background designs had an influence on what I wanted to achieve.

Things were now starting to take some shape, but I had still done very little planning as to what the Brothers actually were, what they did in the forest, where they came from and ultimately what I saw this project becoming. Every character needs a good backstory to give them purpose, so for the next several weeks I set about exploring the orange world where the Brothers lived and what they might encounter along the way.

Next up . . . Part III: Here Come the Bad Guys