My second years were being quite self-directed today, scribbling away furiously in their sketchbbooks, so I got time to do a bit of sketchbook work myself. Here is some more Work-in-Progress on the previously mentioned branding exercise I set my BA students last week.

My final idea is slowly coalescing inside my vacant skull. It’s going to be some kind of 1950s style retro-themed promotional material for a “Design-Bot” robot toy. I’ve not quite decided yet on whether to try and produce the packaging itself, or settle for an advertisement.

Ideally I’d like to make the packaging and also make the toy itself to go inside it. But I think that might be biting off more than I can chew, since I have to try and fit this stuff in round my normal teaching and spreadsheet-sucking duties. So I may regretfully have to settle for the less ambitious advert idea.

Anyway, here are a few more sketchbook pages wot I done today and yesterday. As you can see we’ve not got much in the way of actual design down on paper yet. I’m still busy defacing a stack of old 50s reference material. However doodling away like this does help me think of ideas as to the shapes colours, print style, fonts, etc. I’ll end up using. So it’s not time wasted

[I hope!]

Atomic Energy Toy

I found this old ad for an “Atomic Energy” lab, which presumably dates back to the time when radioactive materials were the exciting playthings of the future and not something that children were best told to avoid messing with.

More Retro Ads

Showing some nice examples of cheap 2 and 3 colour printing with not very accurate registration.

And More…​

A bit of relevance crept in here in spite of my better intentions as --amongst other found imagery-- I actually doodled idly on a printout of the packaging for an old retro space rocket toy.