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Winter 2022
News for Alumni and Friends of the Cleveland Institute of Art
Creativity at play
Toy shopping this holiday season? CIA alumni might’ve designed that great gift By Carlo Wolff Talk to artists who work in toy design and you’ll find agreement on some job basics: openmindedness, a willingness to take risks, and the ability to think like a child. In Tim Hayes’ phrase, a toy designer requires a “fun brain.” Atticus Tsai-McCarthy loves the stories toys can tell, and Jordan Perme and Christopher Lees like the ways toys enhance childhood and amuse adults. All established their grounding in the field as students at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Hayes ’07 earned an Industrial Design degree and now heads Cleveland-based Cardboard Helicopter Product Design, which designs for hire, co-brands for royalties, and creates original products. Tsai-McCarthy ’16 (Industrial Design) works for LEGO, the iconic Danish company known for its interlocking plastic products. Perme ’09 earned a BFA in Fiber + Material Studies. Lees, her husband, spent two years at CIA after earning a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Akron. They founded Horrible Adorables, their line of cute, unsettling creatures, in 2011. Perme also does freelance toy and textile work.
Each alum brings fresh perspective to an industry slowly emerging from the pandemic. Inventiveness is key All the paper route money Hayes made as a kid went for toys, and his favorite was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Pizza Thrower, a kind of tank that blasted out plastic pizzas. As an adult, Hayes still plays, but now it’s with Oculus Rift, the virtual reality headset from Meta. He’s not sure he’d call it a toy, but it evokes a sense of creative play that Hayes uses for designing, sketching and gaming. Cardboard Helicopter pushes the envelope with fresh riffs on the familiar, like his favorite invention, Ready Set Fetch. Playing with Ready Set Fetch is like throwing a dog a Frisbee, but less tiring. Designed for the midline Boston toy company Franklin Sports, the variable-speed device spits out discs more than 85 feet for two hours. “Imagine a baseball pitching machine on its side, launching this thing in a backyard,” says Hayes. “I would say that’s one of the coolest things that came out that’s kind of just revolutionary.”
Clockwise, from top left: A few Horrible Adorables and founders Christopher Lees and Jordan Perme ’09; Cardboard Helicopter-designed toys and co-founder Tim Hayes ’07; a Jurassic Park LEGO set and designer Atticus Tsai-McCarthy ’16.
His business is ideas, Hayes suggests. He hopes to find time to design a cardboard helicopter—or, better yet, a “future ball.” These concepts are in the early stages. Already out and big hits: NERF Paddlepong (“soft” table tennis with no ball) and the NERF Spiral Grip, a toy football with an elegant, palpable texture. Working for an icon Tsai-McCarthy found his dream job when he joined LEGO as a designer in February 2020. Not only did he design sets of toys with a Jurassic Park theme, he’s enraptured by the lore of LEGO, which was launched in 1949. His education stood him in good stead, but becoming comfortable with toy design wasn’t easy. When he entered CIA, Tsai-McCarthy thought he would become a comic book artist or game designer, but he pivoted toward Industrial Design. While he knew ID was challenging, he also felt it could help him pursue toy design, a field in which successful expressions involve storytelling.
Hayes also gets a kick out of the dinosaur taco holder Cardboard Helicopter came up with. This functional plastic triceratops, which his company licenses, scrambles toys and kitchenware.
CIA faculty who helped him develop include ID chair Dan Cuffaro ’91, Dennis Futo ’84, Doug Paige ’82, Pete McEachen ’94, Carla Blackman and Adrian Slattery. Cuffaro and Futo allowed him into the major, and along with Paige, “gave me experiences akin to my real-world encounters as a designer.” Blackman and Slattery helped ground him, and McEachen works in the field.
He’s especially proud of the NERF Proshot Foam Soccer Ball, a soft, embossed foam ball superior for grip designed for Franklin Sports.
Tsai-McCarthy also credited ID’s tradition of working on designs for major toy companies such as Little Tikes, Hasbro and Mattel. 1 Continued on page 4