Samplers, Samples & Swatches for Fillamentum
I’m very happy for the experience and possibility to be the idea maker/co-designer of these products for Fillamentum, the producer of high-quality materials for 3D printing, where I was a CMO for almost five years. It’s a blessing to have great products like these to prepare marketing for.
I asked Antonin Nosek, with who I love to collaborate on 3D printing projects, to help me with designing, prototyping, and printing final products. To have a good partner with many experiences was very helpful and we enjoyed it a lot too.
It was a pleasure to design functional and aesthetic samples for makers!
Sample Cassettes
The first problem to fix - event showcase of PLA materials. PLA was the most used 3D printing material at that time. The company missed a nice sampler for events, to present how many awesome colors they produce.
Of course, the road to the final shape was long, with many iterations : ).
The Cassette
The shape is perfect. Big enough to display the used material and still perfectly small to not take up much space on the table at an event. As a bonus, the cassette is a very familiar shape for people my’s and older generation, which used them to play their favorite music on = positive recognition and adoption.
The cassette contained a canal on the side for placing a name tag for the color name to easily identify the shade. Lamels helped to hide small imperfections of printing and make a good grip for manipulating the object.
Event showcase
Fillamentum offered more than 40 different shades of PLA and we could do a nice rainbow palete with these, what was eye catching.
Btw. the set of cassettes was used for few years on events, often reprinted, because it was a popular “souvenir“ to steal.
Spool like
The surface reminds the winding on a spool, what we found also good to be visually bound to 3D printing at the first sight.
But we needed to rotate all photos because people though it’s a photo of a spool, not a 3D printed object on it.
It’s all about the Color
Photos of Casettess were used as a color preview in the e-shop. All photos from that time were made with a color calibration to get the best matching look on a monitor/phone/tablet.
While releasing a new color, this photos should help to promote the beauty of it in detail on printed piece and not just be a photo of a spool.
Dust keeping
Many times people also though photos of them are renders. Nope : ). Here you can see how we left a few dust grains or printing imperfections to show the realness.
Assets for graphics
The cassettes photos are great for many uses, not just as a product default photo for e-shop, but also as background graphics for sale and event visuals.
Simply & beautiful
They were very photogenic and I prepared these visuals so makers can see all blue shades in one photo and can judge which shade is the best for their project.
The plan was to redo them with all new colors.
Swatches & Sampler
All of the samples and swatches were designed to be, as we - makers ourselves, would love to have them. Swatches were another step for presenting PLA colors. We wanted to have in the end a sampler possible to hold all swatches at once, easily organizable with adding more new pieces because the company was adding more and more to their offer. A practical steel wheel was a great solution to store the samples and look great.
The swatch contained two steps that show how filament works in different thicknesses and a label on the back to easily identify the name of the color.
New releases
We agreed on a rule, that while releasing a new color, swatches will be ready too, so designers & makers will have the possibility to add the new ones to their collection.
Sampler
It looked really great and was very practical. I still have one at my drawer and use it while designing 3D printed objects.
I insisted on that all colored materials should have one (CPE, TPU, TPE, Timberfill…).
For flexible materials we came with a longer version with different density, so you could bend them to feel the stiffness.
15 m Samples
The best way for makers to find out if the selected material is suitable for the purpose they need, especially while searching for special technical abilities, is to try it themselves. I prepared a product specification, where samples could be stacked as vinyl records in a storage box. The sticker on the left upper corner helped to identify the type and color of the material. Silica gel kept the string dry and sticker… let’s face it, we all love stickers : ).
15 m Samples should be prepared with each new release so makers could test them immediately.
Discovery sets
I wanted to offer makers to test new materials in interesting packs - Discovery sets. For me it was always very similar to beauty products - you want to try them all : ).
I wanted the visuals to step out a bit from classic Fillamentum design, but still, be in a good match to everything else.
The “first move” - Leftovers
This project of mine wasn’t a sample. But it was an idea to solve the issue of many printing people - What to do with the last few meters on the spool. Many times happens that you end up with the last meter on a spool and need to throw it away because it wasn’t enough for printing anything. So I came up with the idea of printing something so small, nice, what you can gift to somebody. Because not everybody has something 3D printed ever in their hands and also you could show somebody which colors you have. Stl was adjusted for 1, 2, 5, and 10 m leftovers.
