Last year before closing shop at Black Eye Design and going solo, we put together a self-promo that I am still proud of. The idea came to me while making some homemade Play Doh for my then three year old son: wouldn’t cyan, magenta, yellow and black Play Clay be a fun giveaway for fellow art directors and designers. Something to goof around with and have some fun. We’d send out sets to colleagues and see what they put together.
Grace Cheong did a bang-up job of executing my vision for the packaging. My wife, and then studio coordinator, Jen Blais was invaluable in finding just the right tin cans for the packaging, and the perfect cardboard tubes for mailing. The whole set of four colours was packed in a tin with a circular booklet explaining the project: make something with the play clay and then send us a photo for our blog. The circular booklet was cut with an amazing little home plotter (all that scrapbooking equipment is really a boon for DIY promo projects).
There were cute little blurbs on each colour, like “Yellow—are you really reading 6 pt white type against this background? You’re dedicated“. It was a fun project. We had a blog set up, assembled our packages, and sent off a first batch to designers we admired. The idea was to have a continually updated site with the photos we received — a dialogue with people around the world who we hoped were able to take a moment and relax with this little craft project.
We were so pleased to receive images from Jan Wilker’s studio, James Victore (and son), and Black Eye intern Amandine Maillarbaux (all below). But by that time, I’d made my decision to pack things up at Black Eye Design. I didn’t want to run a design studio anymore, and the project stopped before it really got a chance to get started. Perhaps something to revive in 2010?
“Pasteque” (Watermelon), Amandine Maillarbaux
“Dough Guy”, Karlsson Wilker
“Poobird”, Luca Victore with James Victore
Untitled, Luca Victore
what a lovely idea. Obviously playdough makes these colors and sells them but the whole idea of CMYK is fun and cute and very endearing to print designers. If you do revive it this year, please send me a set. I’ll do a clay vintage penguin good cover for you.
Black is harder to find, but it’s a fun project. I just need to update the packaging a tad and put together a new list. I love the idea of constructing book covers in the play clay!
Haha! I didn’t even see this! It’s nice to have the productions all together.
Hope everything is fine for you, Jen and the kids!
I wish we’ll be able to see each other soon… I’ll let you know if I fly toward MTL!
Cheers and hugs.
Wish I got one of those packages, for sure one of the best clever ideas that I saw. Congrats!