Flat Friends: From Poster to Play
The original experiment used large colour fields and a handful of rounded shapes to give three unrelated subjects the same visual accent. This studio extension tests whether that accent can survive a third dimension. The octopus chef, chick and husky become a small soft-vinyl family, with packaging and character cards built from the same circles, softened corners and colour zoning. The point is not to make the drawings more complicated; it is to discover how little information a character needs before it feels ready to leave the poster and sit on a desk.
Flat Friends at Play
This independent product-development study gives the poster characters something more useful than another pose: a small world with rules. The octopus chef, chick and husky are first redrawn as a coherent vinyl family, sharing proportion, surface finish and accessory scale while keeping three very different silhouettes. The same characters then test three kinds of play. As bath toys, buoyancy and drainage determine the forms: the octopus squirts, the chick rights itself, and the husky sits inside a tiny floating hull. The magnetic fishing game returns to the poster’s seafood cast and turns the three heroes into oversized handles, so character and action become the same object. The fold-out restaurant gives the group a social setting with a counter, kitchen and seaside table that pack back into one case. Colour remains generous, but the product logic is deliberately disciplined. Each proposal grows from the flat shapes rather than adding ornamental detail, proving that a simple illustration can support a surprisingly broad toy system when personality, scale and use are designed together.
