PLAY: (verb), to engage in an activity for enjoyment and recreation.
MARK: (noun), a badge, brand, or symbol defining a territory.
PLAYMARK DESIGN leverages over 20 years of Play and Entertainment Business experience designing, developing, and implementing successful global products, brands, stories, and entertainment. Partnering with our clients to create and connect consumer centric brands, stories, and experiences designed to engage, entertain, and empower...oh, and have as much fun as possible doing it!
Brand Story Development: All brands, products, and experiences tell a story, whether intended or not. The Brand Bible Development Process begins with a series of immersive sessions with key brand stake holders to first understand the brand's history, message, story, and consumer relationship, to then evaluate how that supports your current brand goals and strategies. At the end of this process you will have a deeper and clearer understanding of your brand and a new tool to help inform-inspire-align brand partners.
Integrated Product & Story Design: Create compelling characters, stories, and worlds designed to engage and entertain your core consumers; that drive and support play patterns, products, and experiences; and embody your brand's overarching story and message.
Innovation Strategy: Develop tools, strategies, and concepts to expand your brand's commercial footprint, evaluate and explore new commercial categories, new technologies, new partners, and create new products and concepts to realize them.
Product Design & Development : Explore and develop product strategies, brainstorm and create new concepts, inventions, experiences, and drive them to delivery.
Creative Team Leadership: Lead, mentor, and support creative teams with tools and techniques to inspire new thinking and drive design productivity thru fine tuning the creative tension between deadlines, resources, and exploration.
As Head of Hasbro's Property Development Team we re-designed and and successfully re-launched the My Little Pony pre-school brand into a Global Girl's Entertainment Brand. Building around the brand's core tenet of "Friendship", we created a new cast of characters, amazing worlds, and introduced a level of humor and adventure the brand had never experienced to expand our demographic to girls (and some boys) of all ages.
Successfully synchronizing the story, commercial strategy, and transmedia calendar. We executed our global brand blueprint and doubled the brand business in 3 years. My team was also responsible for the design/development of the core product line, including fashion dolls, feature dolls, mini-dolls, exclusives, figures/playsets, blind bags, etc.).
The re-imagined MLP brand drove over $500million of business in it's first 3-years.
Early in my career I invented "Chuck the Truck" while managing the Tonka Design team (Patent number: 6039626 "Voice-activated toy truck with animated features). Chuck was built to be a pre-school boys best 4-wheeled friend, and went onto become a very successful pre-school vehicle brand.
Then as Head of Hasbro's Property Development Team I began building Chuck from a product into a property. We created a cast of of hard working friends, and a story that we told thru his animated series (2 seasons, (75) 11-minute episodes and a movie). Resulting in a very successful global product line that generated over $250M in lifetime sales.
Led the team responsible for setting the creative vision for Hasbro's portfolio of entertainment brands and ensuring it was executed in entertainment, core toy/game, licensing, digital, and publishing.
Our charter was to invision, inspire, drive, and align all development partners to execute against the brand's creative blueprint and transmedia calendar.
Brands included: Tranformers, My Little Pony, The Littlest Petshop, Magic the Gathering (Kaijudo), and Playskool (RescueBots), Pound Puppies, Care Bears, Clue, CandyLand, RISK, Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, Family Game Night.
Categories supported: entertainment, licensing, core toy/game, publishing and digital gaming.
We also managed the creative development of Hasbro's IP vault and incubator properties. For brands like, Action Man, Jem, Stretch Armstrong, and M.A.S.K..
As head of Playskool Pre-school Design I managed creative development for the Tonka and Mr Potato Head brands along with the rest of the Playskool pre-school portfolio.
I started my design career working in Kenner's Male Action Group, developing licensed TV and movie pitches (Batman, Demolition Man, Planet of the Apes, Congo, Blade Runner, Jurrassic Park, The MASK), and designing product for existing licenses Batman and Superman Animated Series, Star Wars, VR Troopers, Gargoyles, Aliens, Shaq Attack, and others.
Below is a sketchbook of figure poses-proportions-concepts, vehicle studies, and other rough concepts and ideas.
I was a Creative Director within Hasbro's InnovationWORKS team, an internal invention team that created product concepts/inventions for all of Hasbro's business units (Boys, Girls, Preschool, Games, Interactive). We also worked new technology companies (large and small), to both understand their capabilities and create concepts to utilize them.
Partners included...IBM, Apple, Intel, iROBOT, Logitech, Nuance, Nike, MIT
While leading Hasbro's Global Property Development team one of our responsibilities was to define and create the Brand Bible, which was the complete creative/communication resource for the brand.
Before designing a branded property, product, or experience we worked to first understand the larger brand story and message to ensure it's both relevant and important to the consumer and brand goals.
The brand bible development process starts with a series of immersive sessions with key brand stake holders to understand the brands history, message, and consumer relationship to then evaluate how it supports your current brand goals and strategies. If the brand story and current business objectives align, we'll begin creating the Brand Bible toolset. If not, we'll begin modifying the brand story to align with your objectives and drive the desired consumer experience.
The finished Brand Bible will articulate all the brand background information a development partner needs to both completely understand the and brand to effectively develop work to support it. Including the brand's message, meaning, history and timeline, target audience (past, present, and future), brand DNA (the elements the make the brand unique), it's story, characters, and key brand assets/elements/inspiration.
The FreeRange ARTisan is an art studio where I create custom art and build artifacts for clients looking for a personal piece of art to tell their story.
So why the name? Well, my last name roughly translates into "Meadow Hen" or rooster depending on gender ;) And I've always enjoyed making custom gifts (paintings/decor/furniture) for friends and family so the FreeRange ARTisan was born to share my FreeRanging creations.
So take a look at some of the work I've done (freerangeARTisan.com), and drop me a line.
Thanks,
Mark