Motorola

As a Sr. Designer for Motorola Mobility, I worked primarily on Messaging products. This was the era right before smartphones hit the market. The Razr was being developed, and small text messaging products were all the rage. For context, Blackberry was the leader in SMS communication. My official title was "Sr. Designer, European Liaison V. Brand". V. was a sub-brand, focused on the youth market. The V. Design Team was located in Milan, Italy. While I lived in Boynton Beach, Florida, I spent much of my time in Milan, working with the designers there to create vision products that would help to define and illustrate the new brand experience.

motorola V.100

When this product was first imagined, Motorola owned the messaging category for enterprise. The V.100 was a response to consumers adopting SMS texting as a common means of communication. The primary target user group for the V.100 was teens and tweens. In an effort to move fast, something that Motorola wasn't known for at the time, the GUI was borrowed directly from existing Motorola GSM phones. This allowed the design team to focus on the hardware, and the relatively new architecture - integrating a QWERTY keyboard with a "feature phone".

The Youth Market
The V. sub-brad had a very diverse user group in mind, stretching from pre-teens to twenty-somethings. In the end, the design team focused on the younger end of the market, because older youth wanted to be seen using the products that their parents used, not products that looked like they were designed for kids.

V.100 concept sketches - John Ledingham, Motorola Design

V.100 concept sketches - John Ledingham, Motorola Design

The V.100 was being designed just as the translucent iMac was being released. This was a time when nearly all consumer electronics' CMF were highly saturated, translucent plastic. It resonated with the end user, but did nothing to reinforce the technical prowess of the product.

Color, Finish & Materials

motorola/timex beepwear watch

Beepwear was a collaboration between Motorola and Timex. The goal was to create a pager watch that would replace the bulky physician-style pagers of the day. This was a last ditch effort by Motorola to reinvent its paging business. The product was actually quite successful, but ultimately suffered from the lack of a proper distribution channel (a common problem for crossover and co-branded products). I think just about every designer wants to design a watch. Granted, this program had a lot of constraints (board size, fixed display, challenging cost targets, etc.), but as a watch enthusiast, and collector, it was a wonderful program and a great learning experience.

Concept Renderings

Photoshop renderings, illustrating four very different directions for the watch. The final product was similar to the lowest-cost approach; the black watch with the web band.- John Ledingham, Motorola Design

motorola iden i700 mobile phone

Beepwear was a collaboration between Motorola and Timex. The goal was to create a pager watch that would replace the bulky physician-style pagers of the day. This was a last ditch effort by Motorola to reinvent its paging business. The product was actually quite successful, but ultimately suffered from the lack of a proper distribution channel (a common problem for crossover and co-branded products). I think just about every designer wants to design a watch. Granted, this program had a lot of constraints (board size, fixed display, challenging cost targets, etc.), but as a watch enthusiast, and collector, it was a wonderful program and a great learning experience.

Early concept sketches - John Ledingham

Photoshop concept renderings - John Ledingham

CMF
Pre-production Color, Material & Finish models for evaluation. Sadly, Motorola chose to produce solely the Black and Yellow versions.

Lifestyle
The i700 had two primary user groups: Contract workers and active lifestyle enthusiasts. Two very different groups, with surprisingly similar needs (i.e. different scenarios, similar use cases).