Convenience
Apologies for the blog outages over the past couple of days. I’ve moved the whole shebang to a new directory (www.suffernfamily.com/blog) in preparation for the new design-focused front page to the site. There will be a PSA at the top of the new page for a while to remind you all to update your bookmarks, where applicable, and to thank you for your continued readership. Unfortunately the big move coincided with a rash of issues my publishing service was having with FTP uploads, so without getting unbearably technical, if you tried to access the blog Monday evening you were probably out of luck (or fortunate, depending on your point of view). But, as they say, watch this space.
They’re going to prototype one of my designs here at work! They’ve prototyped a couple of my designs before, but this is the biggest one yet. To give you a rough idea of the process here, the design department–all three of us–comes up with ideas (concepts) for displays based on an initial set of specifications and conversations with the client. If they like one or two, we’ll prototype them and hopefully the client will be pleased enough to order X number of them for their stores. But the vast majority of the time the concepts, however creative they may be, aren’t what the client is looking for, and they just disappear into design oblivion. Out of the several hundred concepts I’ve put together since I began here in January, only three or four have been prototyped and none have made it into stores, at least to my knowledge. But this latest design, whether or not it makes it past the prototype stage, will be pretty cool to look at. It’s for Hot Wheels, and without going into too much detail (it’s all still very hush-hush in the industry), it’s a new merchandising system for their Basic Cars line that looks like a Ferris wheel. The axis runs parallel to the shelf front and the unit is about 4 feet wide, with 8 “tiers,” if you will, that contain 10 cars each. It’s the last one I thought they’d pick to prototype, but they like it and want to see it in real life. I’m excited.
P.S. — It occurred to me that you all might want to see these: 1 2. It appears our little girl bears an uncanny resemblance to older male statesmen. Hmm.
