The Design Stuff

What you have here is a collection of designs known as "package comps."

Comp is short for Composite - a slang term from the days when initial package designs were knocked together out of a composite of colored paper, photostats, hand-drawn ink, and white glue or hot wax. They were extremely crude, and were only a "first step" towards the visualization of what a particular package would look like in final form.

There are still places doing design this way, but the modern take on things is completely digital, allowing comps that could be mistaken for the final product itself. There is an ability now to manufacture high-quality graphics on a short timetable, thanks to programs like Photoshop. Also, a connection to the www is like having a world-sized filing cabinet of images to dig through, for refrence or what have you.

With these tools, I started into this project, determined to produce a design that wouldn't look out of place in "We B' Toyz" between the Batman figures and the 'bendable luke skywalker' toys. To start off with, I studied the existing range of Dr. Who toys I could find online. My best source of refrence was the Skaro Toy Museum, and it proved to be invaluable in thisinstance. Not all the toys had packaging with them, but enough did to give me a proper look. Also, I've seen the Dapol packaging at Sci-Fi cons before. (where they wanted $150 for the police box(without console), and $75 each for the figures! aaa!)

To tell the truth, I never really Liked Dapol's packaging. I don't mean to knock Dapol, and honestly, I really really wish I had some Dapol figures of my very own (*sob!*sniff*donations from the UK gladly accepted!) - but their package design was kind of flat and boring. I decided to go for a snazzier, more eye-catching design.

First, I hopped onto the WWW, and surfed around a little to collect images of Doctors, logos, and then finally to study up a little more on action figure card design - The site at: http://www.mcmsys.com/~kingpin/carded.htm gives a good overview of Star Wars Action Figure package designs over the years - and the Action Figure Ring was full of good sites with shots of various action figure card art pieces.

I also made good use of The Shillpages Doctor Who Image Archive - a fantastic source for Doctor Who Images.

I decided first off, to use the TV-Movie/Pertwee Logo, as it was the most recent. The only version of the movie logo I could find on-line though was lo-res and not nearly large enough, hence the need for a re-do. I sketched up four rough package designs in my sketchbook - very loose sketches. After discarding two of them because they weren't balanced enough for me, and a third because it was too similar to the layout for the Dapol figures, I finally had my design - only making two small changes. I decided to center the logo - whereas in the rough it had been set to the left. Also, I went with the trapezoid "character name" box, whereas the original sketch idea had an ovular box under the character image box.

The Vortex background was created in KPT's Bryce2 By creating a boolean cylinder, with another cylinder used to "cut out" the center of the first - creating a tunnel I could stretch from horizon to horizon. A single light was placed at the tunnel's end, and fog was increased to 100% for that nice eerie glow. The tunnel itself was given an ambient glow of 60, to keep it from disappearing into blackness.

The new logo was created in Photoshop - where I composited the selected images of Doctors onto the design. Trapezoid character image box and character name boxes were hand-drawn, and finally a rectangle was blurred and used as a mask to lighten the card area where the figure itself would be placed on the finished package.

The most daunting challenge of the whole project was trying to think up objects for various Doctors to Carry. I suspect the bubble-plastic over the 5th Doctor package would need to be especially creative to allow for the figure, plus the TARDIS tool kit *and* a cricket bat - but I think it might *just* fit.

From initial thought, to first finished package design took just under ten hours. After that it was an easy job to remanufacture the package to accomodate different figures.

Also, even though the package was designed to allow placement of either a "box" style company logo or a "title" style company logo, no toy company logo has been affixed to these designs.

But before you go, there's something for you to look for on the packages. I deliberately made a fatal design error on the packaging - just to protect my own backside, I admit it. I'm paranoid about getting ripped off. This flaw would effectively keep this design from being usable for a real actin fiure line. Let's see if you can figure out what that flaw is. *evil grin*

Anyway, that's the story. Hope you enjoy!

-Chris Sutor
cobalt@tigerden.com