COMBINE CLASSIC TACTILE PLAY WITH THE BEST OF DIGITAL LEARNING

chief creative officer // brand identity // creative direction // app & product design // company culture & leadership

FEEL WHAT YOU LEARN!

It was 2016, and tablets were pretty much ubiquitous in a lot of households. Kids over the age of one were starting to get more and more screen time while swiping and sliding their way through this new and exciting digital landscape.
However, manipulating and playing with real objects is a big part of a child’s learning process. So we brought the best of both worlds together, and created one of the first series of physical toys that interacted with award-winning learning apps on tablets.
**“Tiggly are leading in a space where others are destined to follow.”**
**— Huffington Post**

TIGGLY: A BRAND

TIGGLY IS A NONSENSE WORD THAT’S SUPER-FUN TO SAY!
I wanted to create a character for the brand that looked like the word Tiggly. A little bit squishy, a lotta bit stretchy, and a whole lotta fun. A character without too much definition, so each kid could project whatever they wanted into Tiggly.

TIGGLY TOYS

I THOUGHT OF EACH TIGGLY TOY AS A KEY THAT OPENS UP A DIGITAL TOY BOX.
For every app I created across the product line, I wanted a really wide variety of characters, textures, and sounds to populate each experience. Each one should feel like an exploration through play, and each interaction with a toy on screen should feel purposeful and magical. The joy and variety of a toy box on the screen.

SHAPES GOT TALENT!

Tiggly Shapes is geared towards our youngest of users, helping them learn about basic shapes as well as language exploration.

For Shapes Got Talent, we teamed up with the Jacob H. Schiff Foundation Professor of Psychology & Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, Herbert Ginsberg, who created an interactive story that explored basic geometry, language & storytelling concepts, and SEL.

A CHEF, SOME CARDBOARD, & AWARD-WINNING MATH APPS

One of our most popular characters in the Tiggly canon, Chef (voiced by Sesame puppeteer and VO artist, Tyler Bunch), is as sassy as a spicy hula monkey cake. Kids take on the role of sous-chef as they use math to help Chef prepare ingredients for his one-of-a-kind kitchen concoctions!

For Tiggly Cardtoons, I based this gesture counting game on a game I used to play with my own kids where we would take scraps of cardboard, and see what interesting characters and stories we could create by rearranging them in creative ways.

spot directed by Jarett Bellucci

animation by Dale Clowdis

WORDS ON THE STREET!

For Tiggly Words, I wanted the apps to be bigger, and more exploratory, with a wide range of experiences from the familiar to the fantastical. A perfect playground for the magic of early language learning.

We partnered with Sesame Workshop for our first major IP collaboration. I was able to leverage my experience of having worked with the Sesame crew on the television production side, to create an app that we are all incredibly proud of. We were also able to brake some new ground for the Sesame brand.

More about Sesame Street Alphabet Kitchen

animation by Fangyu Yang & Dale Clowdis

animation by Dale Clowdis