Wally the Green Monster Pillow Pet

Is there really anything to say besides I'm envious of those who have the cool job of designing all the variations of pillow pets out there?  In this case, it's Wally the Green Monster - the Boston Red Sox mascot.

I happened to go on a tour of Fenway Park and we were told to wait in the team store before it started.  As soon as I saw this I knew I wanted it. After 20 min of roaming the store, I found myself circling the display, so I knew I needed to buy it.  It's fun, and it's functional (as a pillow)!  Form AND function! Imagine that! :)

M&M Merchandising

So I must admit that I'm an M&M character fan. I'm fairly sure, if I dig through my art portfolio, there's a blue M&M (maybe it's yellow) somewhere in there. Actually, thinking about it, it might even have been a middle school art poster (in which case it was most definitely yellow and not blue).

Anyway, I've always been a fan. I think things that are round with a face on it are cute, and they're even funnier when they talk and are personified.

This shouldn't be all that surprising, after all, the baby-face bias is a well known design principle (things that look like babies will naturally appeal to us - it's an evolutionary instinct - after all, if we found babies ugly, we wouldn't protect it, and the human race wouldn't be able to continue).

Therefore, when I walked into the M&M World store in Time Square and saw this giant Blue M&M dressed like Elvis rotating on a disco floor I couldn't pass up the chance to really act like a tourist and get my picture taken with it.

I have to bow to the absolute genius of the toy designers when I saw the Lady Liberty M&M dispensers in the store.

Of course it makes sense to have a Lady Liberty dispenser when you're in NY.  Integrating it with the Green M&M, which, up until the beginning of this year, was the only lady M&M, is pretty ingenious.

I actually saw this on a previous visit, but didn't buy it because (1) I had not seen the real Statue of Liberty yet (2) if I had an M&M dispenser, then I would be eating lots of M&Ms.

But since I made it to the real Statue of Liberty this time, I could justify the purchase.

This is the genius of M&M merchandising. I'm envious of the toy designers who were in the position to create such an ingenious product. If only I trained in industrial design, I might have had a shot at working as a toy designer for them! Oh well, I'll admire with my pocket book instead.

3D Puzzle - Pearl of the Orient

I had a chance to put together the 3D puzzle of Shanghai's Oriental Pearl Tower this afternoon. The box said 180 min or so, and I finished in about 2 hours.

I wonder if the puzzle designers modeled the building first, and then found a way to "flatten" it into puzzle shapes, or if they actually thought in terms of these construction pieces to begin with and figured out a way for all of them to fit together to look like the final product.

It's very intricate, and I can't imagine someone designing this without some sort of CAD program.

Now that I work in the 3D modeling industry, I can't help but wonder if the process of making these puzzles are similar to that of our customers who does design for sheet metal, where a part gets flattened into metal sheets that gets bent into the final product.