Case Study : TrackerMag
TrackerMag was a desk toy/collectible prototype I developed in 2023. My work included branding/logo, industrial design, manufacturing process development and physical prototype creation.
The product brief was to create a satisfyingly tactile fidget toy that could be used to track things like daily habits, glasses of water drunk during the day or exercise routines. I created magazines of various sizes to hold varying numbers of bullets, as well as clear acrylic holders for the spares.
The magazines and bullets are made of resin for ease of manufacture and maximum color variations as well as giving everything a very satisfying weight and sound.
All of the product photography you see below was staged, shot and edited by me. I did a mix of product shots for the ecommerce store as well as a number for promotional and social media use.
Everything was designed and modeled in Fusion 360. The mold masters were printed on a Formlabs 3D resin printer and hand polished before being used to make the silicone molds. I utilized SortaClear 40 silicone from Smooth-on to make the magazine molds and SortaClear 12 for the bullets. The stiffer properties of the SC40 allowed for more structurally stable molds that gave the magazines better dimensional consistency, and the soft stretch of the SC12 made it much easier to demold the bullets.
Samples of packaging labels as well as the many logo variations I went through before settling on the final design. As the formidable Aaron Draplin once said… “Save all of your logo iterations, because vectors are free” and that has stuck with me ever since. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve gone back to earlier versions of something to pull an element or two out for reuse elsewhere.
