Toy Design Engineer/Model Maker (Permanent)
We’re Looking for tinkerers! You will have experience in making things work! Both at a conceptual level where a ‘hands on’ approach is required to prototype and mock up functions, mechanisms and features to prove out toy concepts and play experiences, and also at a maturing level, where you will have experience engineering products (primarily plastics) ready to hand over to a tool maker. Solid Works & Rhino users are preferable, whilst knowledge of Sub-D modelling is desirable. We are also interested in hearing from freelancers with relevant experience in this area.

Toy Designer – (Permanent)

We are looking for experienced product designers who are excited by creating new play experiences, and are great at bringing to life/ translating cool ideas into tangible toy proposals. We’re looking for concept designers, with digital sketching experience and/or conceptual CAD abilities, as well as graphic designers with character and vehicle illustration experience. We’re looking for designers that have an addiction to aesthetic form and detail, and would love to hear from you if this obsession extends to digital sculpting. We are also interested in hearing from freelancers with relevant experience in this area.

Interested? Send your CV and portfolio to hq@designbytouch.com

Major Morgan

Major Morgan was a blue handheld musical character device released in 1979, and popular throughout the early 80′s. It was designed to teach children the basics of playing a musical instrument. The main play area of the toy consists of a membrane that, when pressed in different areas, connects an electrical circuit and produces an electronic sound producing a scale of 16 notes. Major Morgan comes with a set of six cards which can be slotted into his body. These have a code to follow along the top section with matching symbols or colours for the main section. If the symbols are pressed in the order presented by the code, they should produce one of the ten tunes on the double sided cards. These nursery rhymes would be recognised by children, and so the concept of rhythm is not represented by the toy, but would be played according to the child’s knowledge of the song. One card features the actual letters of the musical notes played and one card is blank for a child to create their own tune. The instruction booklet introduces the concept of musical notation. (Description taken from the V&A collections).

Major Morgan was a toy invention, created by Greg Hyman and Larry ‘The Colonel’ Greenberg. It had been created initially as a sound effects device for a T.V show pilot, which later became a bestsller for Playskool. It preceded Alphie and Alphie II, which were both hits for Hyman/Greenberg. (Ref: ‘The Toy and Game Inventors Handbook’ Levy/Weingartner)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVKnF26qFFM

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/gugggar/

Coolest Microsoft Ad ever! People on an Oslostreet  stumble across a glowing  Music Tile and stand on it and the front wall of a club falls down to reveal a live band and dancers!

Happy Halloween from the team at designbytouch

We had far too much fun making our pumkins