Working with Our Design Team From our Industrial Designer, Paul Davis!

Working with Toronto industrial design firm Mako Design means working with a world-class team that is both experienced and extremely passionate about everything design. To help create the best designs and products possible for our clients and their innovative projects, we work with experienced mechanical, electrical, and industrial designers that are always ready and looking forward to taking on the next big project coming their way! In this blog, we asked one of our industrial designers from our Toronto office, Paul Davis, to guest write his very own blog on what it is like to work with an industrial designer from Mako Design! Paul lists the general design process of how we approached and works with our clients.

Working with Our Design Team at Toronto Industrial Design Firm, Mako Design

Working with industrial designers can always be a different and unique experience, depending on who you’re working with. At Toronto industrial design firm Mako Design, we like to keep at a simple and straightforward approach to our design process in order to always keep our goals and communication with our clients as clear as possible. Not only does this help the design team but it ensures that the product will be designed as efficiently as possible.

Check out Paul’s #MeetMako Blog to learn more about Paul and his role at Mako, here!

Our industrial designer, Paul Davis!

The Kickoff Meeting

We always approach our design projects by an initial kick-off meeting with our client. Whether the kick-off meeting takes place over the phone, video, or in office, our kick-off meetings give the design team a chance to meet our clients, learn more about them and their goals, and overall understand their product idea and discuss design specifics. The kickoff meeting also gives us the chance the recognize and catch and early issues with the project idea and design and allows us to solve them early on before we move on to the initial conceptual phase. Personally, as an industrial designer, it’s best to emphasize always keeping our goals, ideas, and kick-off meeting simply from the get-go because the end goal is to overall make a physical prototype and stress less about the detail and specifics.

The Design Sketch Phase

After the kickoff meeting, the designers are left with a good idea about what our clients are looking for in their product design, thus we begin to make the design sketches. The design sketch phase is a vital step in capturing the overall design of the product, whilst highlighting the specific design features and form factor that the client specified during their kickoff meeting.

After making a couple of the first design sketches, it’s important that we schedule another call with our clients in order to review and discuss our sketches before we move forward into creating more refined, and detailed sketches. A review call is also extremely vital for our Toronto industrial design firm before we move forward and start working with creating CAD models just to ensure client satisfaction.

We have a very collaborative team at Toronto industrial design firm Mako Design, which is why the industrial designers work really closely with our mechanical and electrical engineers during the design sketch phase and while creating CAD models to make sure that the design is headed in the right direction to maintain its functionality. We won’t just paint you a pretty picture, we will make sure the design layout is well thought out as well.

A rendering of our client product, CLub-It!, done by Paul

Moving Forward to Prototyping with a Toronto Industrial Design Firm

Once we finish our sketch and models, we will circle back to our clients to review the design concept and any other details and questions. Once our clients are happy with the concept, we will create a final packaged encompassing and showcasing how the product could look like once it’s produced, the renderings, and more. After the clients’ review, we can move onto the prototyping stage and build your project straight from our in-house design studio!

Paul with our client, Reey Yadin, with the finished design of his product, Comfycup!

Want to read more blogs from our team? Click here to read our electrical designer, Simran, explain the best practices for PCB design!

If you have a great new invention and you’d like to learn more about this process, get in touch with MAKO here and visit our website to find out more. Feel free to give us a call at 1-888-MAKO and we can set you up on a call with our product analyst!

About: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop-shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and manufacturing services. To assist our startup and inventor clients, in addition to above, we help with business strategy, product strategy, marketing, and sales/distribution for all consumer product categories. Also, our founder Kevin Mako hosts The Product Startup Podcast, the industry's leading hardware podcast. Check it out for tips, interviews, and best practices for hardware startups, inventors, and product developers. Click HERE to learn more about MAKO Design + Invent!