ShowLights and Dotimals Product Design

At ShowLights we enjoy a design challenge, so having the opportunity to take our larger Christmas themed exhibits and make miniature versions of them for use as a children's creative toy was irresistible.

Dotimals is a designer and manufacturer of unique lighting kits to allow children to build and colour-in their own mini lighting exhibits. They were looking for nine designs to form a festive product family.

We started with the Singing Snowman. One challenge was to modify our designs to be compatible with the Dotimals standards of material, size and number of pixels, while maintaining a familiar look. We use many hundreds of lights for our exhibits, for example, The Singing Snowman has 386 lights in 3 separate strings. This needed to be squeezed down to 100.

We worked closely and iteratively with Will, the Dotimals founder. After some brainstorming, we put together CAD files of the templates with proposed light locations and Will then did the artistic magic to turn them into Dotimals styled characters. After a number of iterations of design we optimized the light layout and imagery to get the Dotimals desired combination of effect during day and when lit at night.

The Snowman looked great so the next challenge was 8 more. We jointly decided on 5 of our singing characters (Snowman, Reindeer, Tree, Gingerbread Boy and Girl) and then added the Nutcracker Guard, Nutcracker Drummer and two from a new Toy Train design we had on the drawing board at the time.

After a number of prototypes, we finalised the designs and we are pleased with the result. So much so that we are collaborating on new designs for release next year.

Dotimals are available to order online at dotimals.co.uk.

We have agreements with Dotimals to be able to offer Dotimals products at ShowLights events for merchandising, allowing children to take home a small piece of our light shows.

For more information on the Dotimals products and merchandising opportunities visit their website at:

www.dotimals.co.uk ↗

The Dotimals Images and Logo are Copyright of Dotimals, see www.dotimals.co.uk ↗

If you would like to work with us on a project or unique lighting exhibit, please get in touch.

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