Thread the Maze prototype designs.

Welcome to Thread the Maze prototype designs, the only recourse on-line that shows you how an idea can go from a sketch on a piece of paper to a real product.

Original Thread the Maze idea concept (please scroll down, for a breakdown of design elements).

The idea was to thread some string through all the holes, starting from the top to a certain hole at the bottom, while avoid crossing over itself, and not going over graphic elements .

The design idea was to originally have a board with holes all over it and a design on one side and nothing on the other. But after talking to David l realised that a two sided design would be better. Avoiding some elements on the graphics, like the seaweed for this graphic adds more to the idea.

l thought that having a small plastic piece (see bottom right hand corner) tied to the end of the string would add more to it, as well as making it easier to thread. But we decided against it because of costs, and that it would've made it harder to thread.

It also took quite a lot of discussion on how many knots should be placed on the end of the string, and how long the string should be, etc.

This graphic is self explanatory!

In this part of the design l played around with rectangle verses oval shape. Me and David thought that a rectangular design would be best. And when creating your designs it's best to come up with half a dozen names to increase your chances of success.

l thought that enlarging the Space design may prove of interest. You have to make your way from the Earth to the Black-hole, while avoiding the string crossing over the asteroids or dark matter (dark-wavy-lines).

ln this design l thought that a spiders web would be fun, and the spiders are a drawing (not 3D)!

In this design l used a fish pond.

An alien idea using the Moons surface.

And a leaf idea; as you can see l went overboard with the detail in the designs. But it's important to create a reasonable number of possible variation designs to increase your chances of success.

These were some additional designs l developed after the first design concept was accepted.

l developed a Golf design, which was one of the designs picked for the products although they had a graphic artist do the final product design. l also thrashed the product names, although by then David thought that "Thread the Maze" was the best one.

As stated before the Company you are dealing with knows a lot more about product development than you probably do, so even though you may want to control all aspects of product development it's best to tag along, unless of course you have a strong, but reasonable objection.

Did a Fish (Ocean) design, that also ended up on one of the products, but as a different design.

And l also tried Snakes, which didn't get accepted.

The last design had to deal with an idea of putting small plastic parts along the string so some elements (Seagulls) had to be above the board and the fish had to end up below the completed puzzle! Too cumbersome a concept, and probably too expensive to be viable.

A concept to be viable has to walk a fine line between Attractiveness, Fun and being able to mass produce it as inexpensively as possible.

This is the first of the four final designs (products). Please note to keep download speeds reasonable the products are a few centimetres shorter than "actual size", and images have been compressed as much as l could reasonably do.

As you can see the string is wrapped around the top and resembles a shoestring; David thought that this would be the best format for threading it through the holes, as well as keeping costs down (easy to manufacture)!

And another thing is when you come up with a successful idea with a Company, you will usually according to the contract-agreement receive the first 6 off the assembly line!

The Golf design is one of my favourites as well as the Coral design below.

If you want to read the writing up the top please go to the Coral design further down.

The other side has the bar code, choking hazard warning, who manufactured the product and who came up with the idea.

The Ant-design (not my favourite one)!

The Sphinx one.

And last but not least the Coral one, one of the other designs l like.

You may have noticed that all the holes are in the same spots on all four designs, to aid in manufacture; and the puzzle itself was quite difficult, but could be solved eventually. l think it took me a couple of hours to do; and l left the puzzle difficulty to David as he was much better at that sort of thing.

Well that's it for the Thread the Maze prototype designs page, please feel free to check out the rest of this web site when ready!

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