A year after graduating from Bennington College, a high school friend and I started CDS Design, an informal creative collaboration. Together we developed ReLaunch, a laser-cut, magnetic marble-run kit designed to be mounted and rearranged on a refrigerator door. We continuously iterated on each other’s ideas for packaging, track design, and branding, incorporating visual influences from art deco and 1950’s-era advertisements. We manufactured and assembled seven kits and had ambitions to create additional rails and add-on modules. We became discouraged when no kits sold after setting up shop at a local holiday marketplace, and CDS Design disbanded soon after. However, this collaboration foreshadowed my future professional work in low-volume, creative product design at Danger!Awesome and The Possible Zone.
