Staging Lane Productions
We began creating logos (mascots) for full size hot rods and soon found ourselves designing packaging for the many themed collectible toys and products that Staging Lane Productions offers.
But our involvement goes so much deeper. With each product presented to us for packaging design, we were also requested to participate in creating the themes. One collectible die cast toy car project was a small western town theme. We designed several logos that served as door art on the toy cars. We then designed appropriate art for the packaging.
Often a collectible car would be packaged with a corresponding card to encourage collectors to continue buying the toys as new ones became available.
Staging Lane Productions has a pretty good intuition about themes that will be popular. It almost seems ridiculous that a voting theme would work to sell toys during an election year, but make the special edition cars red and blue and watch the shelves empty out... literally!
For us, the funnest projects are the 1/18 scale collectible toy cars. We really got to experience the personality of each car and experiment with each theme.
Occasionally, one of the many life size hot rods that owner Steve Metz built, became a scale model toy as well. A wonderful example is the green ’41 Willys Coupe below. It is called the “Frantic Frog”. We designed the mascot logo for the full size hot rod.
As it turns out, there is a collector for just about anything you can imagine... even resin tikis and pinstriped bowling pins. Our task was to draw the buyer’s attention from all of the other toys on the shelves to these unique collectibles. We accomplished it by giving movement to a static rectangular box and with bold graphics and bright colors.
Staging Lane Productions presented us with a small handmade doll. We returned with schematic drawings of body, faces, and hair; clothing and fabric patterns; logos; packaging; hangtags; header cards; and promotional kits for 12 “Gumdrops” dolls. Then we did the same for 9 other themed “–drops” dolls, such as “Pixiedrops”, “Bugdrops”, “Raindrops”, etc.
