Toy Design: Sports Fan Bobblehead

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spots_fan_toy

As I mentioned in a recent post I sometimes design novelty toys for DecoPac, a national leader in the cake industry. Often the toys involve licensed characters but sometimes they are more generic. For this project the client wanted to update the design of their “Sports Fan” cake. I’m not a sports fan myself but I would imagine this particular cake is a popular seller during the SuperBowl and other big sporting events.

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Several toy ideas were suggested including a lenticular lanyard, a folding stadium seat that would hold a beer/pop can, a small keychain radio, and a big screen TV bobblehead. Ultimately the bobblehead idea was chosen. Here’s the final design I submitted, followed by a photo of the actual cake:

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(Cake design © 2009 DecoPac Inc. All rights reserved.)

Mascot For MaroonHelmet.com

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Sorry for the slowdown in blog posts this week. Things have been pretty crazy here. I’m putting in a lot of hours on an animation project, plus this week I also whipped together some storyboards for a major retailer, did some character design sketches for a major food company, and finished up designing a mascot character for a small business in Virginia called MaroonHelmet.com.


(Artwork copyright © MaroonHelmet.com.)

MaroonHelmet.com is a specialty retailer for fans of the Virginia Tech Hokies, a popular college team. Their primary customer base is football fans and they wanted a mascot for their company.

They didn’t want to use the actual Hokie mascot (I’m not sure but my guess is there might be trademark issues involved). The client originally suggested that I take a maroon football helmet and put a cartoon face on it. Although I considered the idea, it would have been difficult to make it work convincingly. One idea I suggested instead was having a cartoon football wear the helmet.

The client also asked that their mascot look fun but tough. They didn’t want him to look mean, but they did want him to have a strong and aggressive attitude similar to the Fighting Irish mascot. So I did my best to capture that in the football’s expression.

I just turned in the final artwork yesterday, so it isn’t up on the MaroonHelmet.com site yet. But I did get the client’s permission to post my work for them online.