Skate City & The Roller Girls

In the mid to late 90s Tyco Toys saw a market in combining elements of Polly Pocket play with Hot Wheels track action, and the result was; Roller Girls!
I was assigned by the small dolls group there to come up with some drawings to pitch the line of dolls and playsets, each doll having a different theme, look, and personality.  Each would also come with an environment base that reflected the dolls' theme and offer some sort of action play.  The playsets would be themed as well, covering mid and higher price points in the Skate City line.

Skate City Salon: Tyco Toys, 1997

Here are some of the initial concept renderings used to define Roller Girls;

This is the Skate City / Roller Girls line as it appeared in the Tyco buyers catalog;

I did work on the large sets as well.
Here are a couple of mid-priced sets in the line;

..It has always been interesting for me to see how a final product differs from my initial concept drawings.  Sometimes I'm more involved in the process of realizing products. It varies, and it's always nice to have that personal creative investment. But I'm just as happy being a smaller spoke in the larger wheel, because everyone else involved seems just as invested in doing their best. It's always a team effort and I'm very rarely disappointed in the results.

Zooballs!

Back in the 90s Tyco Toys called on me to do some conceptual work for their plush line.

The pitch was simple; They're plush animals that are round bouncy balls. (Ah, minimalism!)  
The real task was in making them cute, fun, and marketable, like Beanie Babies (which were HUGE at the time). ..In fact, the price point and consumer niche was geared to compete with the Ty Toys phenomenon. 

Really, there was nothing that was not fun about this project.  I was given free reign regarding what animals to caricaturize, and no limit in the number generated.  It was 'blue-sky' concept work, so I had a good time seeing what I could come up with.
There was some back-and-forth of sketches and ultimately the creatives at Tyco whittled it down to 18 different character balls.  Most of them ended up being designs of mine, with about 5 of them being done internally (which they had me redesign for the sake of consistency).

..And they now had a name:   

Zooballs!

Another great thing about this project was that what I initially came up with was pretty much what ended up on the toy shelves.  A rare occurrence, as typically other designers and/or marketing people will add their own tweaks along the way. I guess everyone thought what I came up with was dandy enough.  ..Though, as mentioned, there were a handful that never made the cut.
..like these poor orphans;

The ones that did make it through the gauntlet needed final renderings for presentation and manufacturing purposes.  There were no Zooball prototypes in existence and these were going to be fabricated overseas, so they needed some solid reference material.  Tyco asked me to generate 2 views of each Zooball character to send to Hong Kong.  'Mugshots' ..if you will.
Here are examples of just some of them;

..for the record? No; I didn't actually pick the names for these guys.

That was someone else's lucky job.