Perfect Counter Design: Part III

Guest blogger: Gray Holland from the design firm Alchemy Labs.

Making it Work - FOR REAL: [July 27th 2008]

After rebooting the counter’s functional design, and winning the Perfect teams support, we had to hustle to still make the Christmas release. The key to maintaining the timeline was incorporating this new soft base without loosing the existing development ground work. Through the guidance of Perfects president and co-founder Mark Friedman, we divided the development tasks: focusing the factory on the counter unit itself and Alchemy concentrating on the base. The base had a fair amount of surface complexity, which would be lost using solid modeling CAD software, thus we used our surfacing expertise within Alias Studio to execute a class “A” surfaced part for tooling release.

Packaging it All Up: [November 5th 2008]

After several tweaks to the tooling database to streamline the manufacturing process the final data was released in mid September. But there we still open issues for this project given its late development, namely that the packaging graphics for the Counter box were due, but there was no real Counters to take pictures of yet. So we used the production CAD data to render the final shots needed for the packaging, providing the last part of the development puzzle, and getting the Counter ready for its “just in time” launch for the 2008 Christmas season.