Holiday Gift: Robot Inspired Camera

Last month I had the extremely fun challenge of tackling the design of our 2011 art buyer/photo editor holiday gift. When we first started thinking up ideas we had to ask ourselves, how can we ever top last year’s Wonderful Machine Holga camera? All of our proposed ideas just seemed to fall short—no matter how tasty chocolate covered pretzels are, they just couldn’t compete. While researching ideas online, we came across CustomCameraCollection, a company that sells client-designed custom disposable cameras.

At first, I was a bit skeptical since I wasn’t sure how “custom” I could make the design. However, after a quick call with Julie, customer service extraordinaire, I was sold. Before getting started, the Wonderful Machine team wanted three concepts to choose from, so I came up with the following ideas: hand drawn holiday, 1950’s packaging, and vintage toy robot.

It’s a no-brainer that we all decided on the toy robot concept since it fits our “machine” brand. Plus, it’s just fun!

I started off the design process by collecting as much visual inspiration as I could find. A lot of the best material I stumbled across was on Ebay—mostly people selling old tin robots for a good amount of change. The Ebay listings included really nice (i.e. detailed) close-up photographs of the toy exteriors, which inspired me throughout the process.

When designing, I find it helpful to print out the design every few days to get sense of what’s working and what isn’t. Doing this with the camera really helped me to see the scale of the design and to adjust accordingly. I probably ended up with at least eight printed camera drafts before the final. The base template the company provided was also helpful since it labeled the different parts of the camera and how it was going to function for the end user. I used this as a guide for the graphic elements.

This is how the final cameras turned out:

Since we were mailing these to art buyers and photo editors across the US, we had to order camera sized cardboard boxes. I designed a simple packaging sticker, which I printed in-house, that we wrapped around every box before sending out to around 90 creatives on our “Nice” list.

If you’re interested in creating your own unique promo, feel free to check out our design consulting page.

Want a Wonderful Machine camera of your own? Follow our Twitter page where we’ll be giving away cameras in the New Year.