From the Vault #10: A Cool Muppet Accessory!

Ok, so in an earlier post I showed you a rendering of the Letter A from an almost Sesame Street action figure line. Let's switch gears from an almost to a definate. Back in June of 2004 I was contacted to make a sticker for Sam the Eagle's podium. It would be some sort of seal that would be similar to the President of the United States (ie: eagle with the shield, olive branch, etc...) Some screen captures from the Muppet Show of said podium and seal were sent up from Palisades Toys to use as a springboard for the design. There was a catch to this though, it had to be done in vector art (for those that don't know what vector art is, there are two forms of art: vector and raster. Raster is pixel based, ie: Adobe Photoshop, while vector is point based, ie: Adobe Illustrator.) The first step in making a design would be some sort of sketch to layout how it should look, roughly. Below is the sketch of Sam Eagle shown on the podium seal.

Next, we take the sketch and scan it in to the computer and import it right into Illustrator. Now, you're probably wondering why it had to be done in a vector format. The reason behind doing artwork in vector is that it can be blown up to any size imagineable and it will not lose any resolution. The image stays as clean at 10,000% as it does at 50%. It really is a wonderful thing, even though it does take a bit longer to design in. So after a few hours of design work, a bunch of tweaks and helpful (and not so helpful) mistakes we end up with a final product that gets sent down to the toy company for approval. If I remember correctly I was on my honeymoon when this was sent down. I remember hanging out daily in the cruise ship's internet cafe to see if it would ultimately get the thumbs up. It did on what I think was the third or fourth day at sea. It would be inserted into the Sam Eagle variant, aka: Shifty-eyed Sam Eagle, whom was limited to one per box.

And a couple months later the product starts to arrive in stores and you can be proud that you worked on toyline that had genuine cool value to it. I mean really, who doesn't like the Muppets? Communists maybe, and perhaps people who have phobias of singing barnyard animals?
Photo Courtesy: Ken Lilly