Newly Released Work (All Product Types)

Nice work on those speakers! The LED ambilight is good for immersion but many people never turn it off - for anything else non-immersive like the news it looks cheap and a bit harsh. LEDs need good diffusers or cast indirect light to create a beautiful ambience, but these speakers do that pretty well!

The page with the 9 concept forms - is that sketchbook/ps or 3-D CAD?

Just PS sketches.
For presentations, I often just do frontview/sideview/topview elevations in Photoshop to explore different directions.
They are very quick to pump out and its easy for me to get into a rythm. For this project I did about 30.

For me CAD is just to elaborate and slow at an early stage and handsketches often don’t give me the right amount of dimensional guidance to consider the internal structure for a good idea about proportions. I always draw the PS concepts at 1:1 scale and use these renders for modelmaking as well.
The hand sketches in this image were actually done after PS rounds and before CAD.

One from the archives. I was going through some old sketchbooks this weekend and found some of my original drawings for the Polk Command bar which integrates full Amazon Alexa functionality into a sound bar. It was so fun to work with the team at Amazon and the Polk engineering team lead by Matt Lyons and Mark Werle on this. This product was unveiled at CES in January.



Really nice Michael!
That scalloped detail is really cool but I kinda would also have loved to see that surfaced protrusion you sketched :wink:

Thanks Bengt. In the end we went down rather than up for a simple reason, TV stand heights. Functionally you really only have 2" of safe zone to play with. The scoop also made for some nice light reflections from the LED ring (we ended up raising the ring a little less than 1mm)… but it also contained those reflections. A little bit of them is a nice aesthetic feature emphasizing when it is listening, but too much reflection under your TV viewing screen can be an annoyance, so the scoop nicely contains that. All of the final surfacing was done by Mark Werle, he did a fantastic job. The back I/O port also perfectly fits an Amazon FireStick… getting the fabric to wrap 360 degrees was a challenge with the factory. I went over to talk through construction methods and work out a bunch of the construction details.

I agree though, the surfacing on that raised one would have been really fun :smiley: … in the doodle some of that bulge is going up, and some is going back. I was thinking perhaps the bar could be shallow but have depth locally to accommodate the LED/mic array… but we ended up needing the depth for acoustic cabinet volume.

@themonet Great work! Are you sure the part was investment cast in the end, the article mentions that it didn’t work because of remaining core material so it had to be forged out of five parts. I am looking into investment casting a somewhat complex (though not nearly as complex as this part) cap and am wondering if there are specific limitations to the wax core. Can it be designed like any injection molded part or are there different limitations/possibilities. Also engineers mention that features like threadings cannot be investment cast because of low tolerances, how did you tackle that aspect.

Craftsman’s pencil.
We wanted to combine the classic builder’s pencil with the classic school pencil. Ergonomics and anti-roll was primary for the pencil, but for the holster we could be more playful with the form. The round hole functions as the locking mechanism with a nice tactile click. It would’ve been more obvious with a different CMF approach, but you can’t win every battle…
The refill has was gonna have the same hexagon/octagon shape of the school pencil, but ultimately required more facets, and we thought it was gonna resemble a classic faceted glass. It became so subtle that it doesn’t even show in photos, but is a nice tactile detail when you hold it.

Just released branding/graphic work I did for the Canada Running Series Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon.

As a runner and designer, this one is pretty special for me. This race was my first marathon and I’m hoping to BQ (qualify for Boston Marathon) at the race this fall.

The STWM is the biggest IAAF Gold Label race in the country with over 25,000 runners. Will be pretty crazy to see so many shirts at one place!

Concept was a bold graphic identity that-

  1. Would be a race shirt that you’d actually want to wear (most are super ugly and most runners have a drawer full of shirts they never wear)
  2. Something that is visible from far in race pics or if you see someone running in it
  3. Something that acts as an ambassador item for people who travel to Toronto for the race or people from Toronto who travel elsewhere for future races (it’s common to rep your home city/country when running a race abroad).
  4. A visual system that could be extended to other races. I previously did the race shirt for the Montreal Half Marathon in the spring. It used a series of lines and graphic pattern with similar type. Future races/events I hope to tie into the theme as as “collect all” type of series.
  5. The dots represent the idea of individual vs. community. While the running community is very strong in Toronto and supports runners through training, it is the individual who runs the race (surrounded by thousands).
  6. The dots also equal the count of kilometers for each of the races. 42.2 for marathon, 21.1 for half, 5 for 5k.
  7. Dots also a subtle nod to Toronto nickname T-dot/T.O.

If I haven’t posted the MTL (Montreal) shirt design I will…





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R

awesome, man! congrats!

Here’s the Montreal shirt design. Did the bibs too.

The 2018 race shirt celebrates the great history of design in Montreal. From the world famous Expo ’67 and 1976 Olympic identities, to the current city logo, modern graphic design has long been a part of the city spirit. You don’t have look any further than the iconic geometry of the Biosphere, designed by Buckminster Fuller (visible on the race route), to see this.

Like the Biosphere, the highly visible MTL shirt design features bold lines and geometry and encourages the viewer to “read between the lines” of the graphic to channel a philosophy familiar to runners of all ability – “Be Bold. Be Strong. Keep it Simple.”

R




@rkuchinsky that stuff is gorgeous. Nice work!

not really newly released, but new to being in possession! A longish story on this one. About 9 years ago I was asked to submit a proposal for designs for the olympic medals and torch. Tthey were looking for a Canadian designer, I told them I wasn’t one, but still threw a pitch in the mix. Part of doing these things is you have to have a path to build them. I was considering working with a prototype and low run production group in Austin. I didn’t get the project, but the prototype shop wanted to build a few working models of the torch for their showroom, which I was fine with. I was so bummed about not getting it that I just kind of forgot about the whole thing… until this week when they sent the prototypes to me… so excited to get them professionally photographed and hung on the wall in the studio!

These one offs were CNC’d out of wood and stainless steel. The handles were then leather wrapped.




Neat!

Very sharp!

I’m spending the week in Montreal and just came across one of your shirts in the wild! Looks sharp! :sunglasses:

This one is a bit of a childhood dream. Debuting today at Comic Con, I’ll be heading down to see the final production pieces in person. The first in a series we did.

People really nerd out on these things (glad it isn’t just me… :slight_smile: ) I’ve been finding lots of people talking about it in toy forums and videos… and even this little meme on twitter … when you find people talking about something you worked on and they love it as much as you do, that is better than any design award.


That’s awesome!

thanks Andy. It was so fun to check out the final in person yesterday at Comic Con.



Looks Cool. A spacey-y Lambo Countach?

Any process stuff, Michael? Would love to see sketches for this. Curious if did you do the car form, and also the robot version and how do transforming constrain the design?

Super cool.

R