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DAN: Hello, everybody.
Thanks for coming today.
I'm Dan.
A few years ago, through a curious turn of events, I
inherited the job of approving Andrew's use of the official
Android trademark.
Which means that I get to see all of his designs before
anybody else.
And so when they asked me to introduce him, I've got a few
stories, as you might imagine.
But I knew immediately there's only one story that I could
tell, which is this.
As I'm sure you guys all remember, if you follow the
little vinyl bug droid figurines and all, in series
one, one of the designs was just a green, straight up
green, bug droid.
But in series two, there was one that was a blue, straight
up blue, bug droid, which I always thought
was a little odd.
And then in series three, there was a red one.
I'm like, oh, that's kind of cool.
And then a few months ago, I saw the
designs for series four.
And there is this kind of like orangey, yellowish one on
there, too.
And I'm like, oh my God, this is an
opportunity not to be missed.
So I pound off this email, and I'm like, dude.
I'm like, what you need to do is that orangey gold one
there, you need to make that Google yellow.
Because then we;ll have all four of the Google colors.
And if you're a long-term collector, you can set these
up in Google colors.
I'm like, this is such a great idea, right?
So a few minutes later, I get a response.
And he says, yeah, that's actually your laptop's color
reproduction.
It will be Google yellow.
He's like, I had this planned all along.
[LAUGHTER]
DAN: And so I became enlightened.
And so I'd just like to say, thanks for all your hard work.
Welcome.
And thank you for coming.
ANDREW BELL: Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
ANDREW BELL: Hello, everybody.
Thanks for taking time out of your day to come listen to me
talk and look at some of my art work.
I'm just going to go through my art and my career a little
bit, show you some of the work I've been working on for the
last couple years, how I got there.
And then we'll move on to some Android stuff after that.
And then we'll take some questions at the end.
So let's get started.
Any of you guys in any art-related department here?
No.
I know there's one small one in the corner
of the other building.
All right.
That's good.
Hopefully this will all work.
This is the story of how I--
it's kind of dark--
accidentally became a professional artist.
So this is my childhood.
[LAUGHTER]
ANDREW BELL: That's going to mess anyone up, right?
[LAUGHTER]
ANDREW BELL: I was destined to be something other than a
doctor or a lawyer from that point.
I had to work out some serious issues.
This was actually in 19--
probably the very early '80s in England.
I was born in England.
And being in England, some of my early influences was this
guy, Postman Pat.
He was one of the early Bob the Builder style, stop motion
animations.
And then moved on to Danger Mouse--
awesome cartoon out of England.
And as I got older, I got a little cooler, started
skateboarding.
If any of you skateboard, you'd probably recognize this,
by an artist named Jim Phillips out of California.
Very iconic.
And then reading comics.
One of my favorite one was "Bloom County." I didn't
really understand it when I was reading it, but I loved
the art style, the design.
And then as I got a little bit older, I got a computed.
I was lucky enough to have a father who was a bit of an
early adopter.
We had one of the first CD drives.
It was like this big.
And we had an Apple 2E, Apple 2C.
So I learned Logo basic.
And the first thing I did with it was try to draw with it.
This is not from the Apple.
This is a little later.
But I got a computer, and I saw the computer as an
opportunity to be creative, not just as an opportunity to
do spreadsheets.
So eventually we got a 386sx-16
with 16 color monitor.
And it was amazing.
So I started doing some ASCII artwork.
I ran a BBS for a while called Apocalypse.
And you can actually read that.
It says apocalypse.
Then eventually, I moved up to all 16 colors and started
incorporating some of the artwork I grew up on and loved
as a kid into ANSI graphics, which is just translating
comics and things for bulletin board system logins.
Are there any BBS nerds?
Anyone old enough?
[LAUGHS]
We've got a couple.
Everyone else is like, what's happening?
[LAUGHTER]
ANDREW BELL: And then this is kind of where I went wrong.
I wasn't destroyed by a Terminator.
It was more so this.
It was when I saw the computer, it wasn't just this
little toy to play around on and make little graphics.
This was a serious tool.
I was kind of blindsided by this.
No other art mattered anymore.
When I was growing up, I used to draw and doodle and make
clay sculptures.
And then I saw this--
I can make things real with this.
This is amazing.
This is the future.
And so when I got old enough to go to college, I decided to
go to art school.
Oh, I forgot that slide.
Sorry.
[LAUGHTER]
ANDREW BELL: But instead of picking art school based on
what the best our program would be or where the best
teachers were, I picked it on who had the best computers.
I went to a few different schools, and that's what
really mattered to me.
So I ended up going to the School of Visual Arts, in
Manhattan, because they had a lab filled with SGIs, which I
guess is appropriate for this building, right?
I was like, whoa, these are the things I've seen on that
one TV special they put out about CGI before it was
popular or people knew it was.
And I was just blown away.
So I spent years ignoring the fine art side.
I still had to take drawing and painting classes.
But I was focused on the computer as not a
tool, as the tool.
I was kind of one-track minded.
I did some OK stuff.
This is my thesis project about killer teddy bears.
[CHUCKLES]
And a bit of an aside--
for the end of the thesis project, you need to have some
sort of logo graphic or something.
So in case anyone's wondering where my company name came
from, my company's Dead Zebra, Inc. And everyone wonders,
how'd you come up with that?
It was a joke in college, is how I came up with that.
And it's since been abstracted a bit to the current logo I
still use today.
So fast forward a few years.
I couldn't find a job in New York doing 3-D animation.
There wasn't really too much going on there.
Blue Sky was still working on "Ice Age" one.
It hadn't come out yet.
I think there was Rhythm & Hues doing commercials.
But wasn't too much to be had.
And no offense to California, but I didn't want to come out
to California.
All the 3-D jobs were in LA.
And being in New York for a few years, I just fell in love
with New York.
And I couldn't see myself driving everywhere.
So I was lucky enough when I was in college to get an
internship at Marvel Comics, which was great.
Just randomly, from my experience in the past doing
computer graphics and putting together some crappy little
web pages, someone said, hey, come work for free for us.
So all right, sounds great.
And eventually that turned into a little job.
And then eventually that job turned into another job at
Nickelodeon.
So I was at Nickelodeon for five years.
And while there, these guys were born.
This is 2002.
And this is the reason I am an independent
professional artist.
It's not Apple.
It's not a Mac.
It's because this computer sucked.
[LAUGHTER]
ANDREW BELL: I'll explain.
So every time this computer that I worked on-- not this
exact one, but one very similar--
it would crash several times a day.
And it would take about 5 to 10 minutes to reboot.
I don't know if it was the software on there or the
networking or what.
But it was awful, and it was a waste of time.
So every time it would crash, I would just grab a little
note card or a Post-it Note and draw something on the
side, not actively thinking, oh, I'm getting back into
illustration.
This is great.
Just thinking I need to kill five minutes and look like I'm
doing something so I don't get fired.
And they're not very good.
There's like a pickle with legs.
I don't even know what that is.
[LAUGHTER]
ANDREW BELL: But I mean, it happened often enough that
this is my desk after awhile.
You can see, I just started putting them up on my cubicle
and around up top there.
And after a few months, I had 100 something little monsters
lying around.
And so being as savvy as I am, I thought, ah, the internet.
I should put them on the internet.
That's a great idea.
Other people should see me wasting time, so it's not just
my coworkers.
So using my rudimentary skills--
this is my first website.
It was built on PHP, some HTML.
And it was built so crappily that if I didn't upload a new
drawing every day, the site would crash completely.
[LAUGHTER]
ANDREW BELL: That was good motivation for me to practice.
Because it would take my email down, with it.
I mean, it was that bad.
[LAUGHS]
I really didn't know what I was doing.
But I ended up keeping up the schedule for years.
I had to force myself into it because I was still getting
out of that mindset as the computer as the tool.
I had go a long way around there.
So I started put them up, new drawings.
I Actually, I put out some black and white screen prints,
just mostly for myself and my friends.
And then people were going to the website
on a regular basis.
I had some friends doing web comics and comic books, and
they shared my link.
Back in the day, there may have been some web rings, if
anyone remembers those web rings.
And eventually I put a t-shirt.
And people bought it-- maybe like a dozen people.
But to me that was blowing my mind.
And this little stapled-together book with
some of my drawings in black and white.
And over the years, the drawings got
a little bit better.
The website got a bit better.
It no longer crashed all the time.
But I did was to keep up my daily schedule for, I think,
six or seven years straight, which is kind of crazy now
that I think about it.
I didn't have much of a life in general.
I took out some ads in some magazines.
Still doing this all on the side while I was at work.
Drew some more creatures.
Drew some more creatures.
Drew some more creatures.
A few more.
Kept going.
And eventually, I had a pretty good stable full of monsters
to deal with.
So armed with all my monsters and a book and some new
t-shirt designs, and a toy-- we'll talk
about those more later--
the next obvious step was to head to Comic-Con, where I
could really meet the fans one on one and talk to people and
have a really close interpersonal relationship
with everyone.
Oh, yeah.
This is Comic-Con.
I'm here, somewhere, I think.
Oh, yeah, here I am.
That's my booth.
All right, luckily, I'd done some smaller Comic-Cons before
that, so I wasn't totally blown away.
But here's proof that I can actually interact with fans at
Comic-Con on one on one basis.
And I got a chance to be spontaneous, talk to people,
draw on the spot, doodle for people.
Probably done thousands of doodles, just people that walk
up to the booth.
And this was 2005, when I said, all right, I've got
enough people that are buying some t-shirts and prints from
me, that know about me, that I'm going to quit my job and
see how it goes for--
I'll give myself six months to a year.
That was seven years ago, so still going OK.
I started taking my drawing over there.
This is an art show at a little toy store in New York
called Kidrobot.
Has anyone seen that?
This is in their original store, and so
it was pretty tiny.
So just art among the merchandise.
But for me, that was a pretty big step.
And then I got a gallery show.
So my first solo gallery show, I decided to tackle the tiny,
easy to deal with subject of everything
between life and death--
[LAUGHTER]
ANDREW BELL: --in the form of different chromosomes in the
artwork, and everything in between that, including
viruses, tumors, parasites.
This is a little sculpture with eggs and skulls together.
And if anyone's ever been to New York for an extended
period of time or is in the art scene, you've probably
been to hundreds of gallery shows.
I know I have.
And they get boring.
They blend together.
They're just art on white walls.
And I realized that, and my artwork is no exception.
So I think one of the best things to do in that situation
is to try to create an experience, something that
people will remember.
I think Google's really good at that, especially with the
Google Doodle team.
So you go to the home page and there's
something to interact with.
You kind of forget just if you go to the Google
page, there's a logo.
It's fine.
But if you go there and you can actually experience
something, you're going to remember that.
Sometimes it's as simple as painting a wall and creating
context for your artwork and products to live in, just
adding some graphics.
Sometimes it's just starting surrounding the artwork.
And then sometimes it's going really big and taking over an
entire space.
This is the cafe section of a gallery space in Paris, just
out of Paris.
A wall-to-ceiling graphics--
can't really avoid it.
And then this is probably one of my favorite
experiences we created.
This is in a gallery show in Chicago, a little
store called Rotofuji.
They have a gallery in the shop.
And the show itself was about famine and death.
It was called "Love the End." My relationship was falling
apart at the time.
Really dark, Earth-ending volcanoes, and oil rig
bursting into flames, and loneliness.
But in the corner the gallery over here, we built a pit.
It was about four feet deep and maybe like five feet wide.
And we filled it with 100 of these guys.
They were called Worribles.
They were designed--
when you hug them they take all your worries away from
you, make you feel better.
And so the show that was actually pretty
dark, all the work--
I mean, it's still kind of playful-- but we had kids
jumping in this pit.
[LAUGHTER]
ANDREW BELL: This one kid in particular was beating the
hell out of everyone else that would come near
him with the Worribles.
So since then, if given the opportunity, I think creating
experience rather than just throwing your art up is
probably the right way to go.
So I'm just going to go through some of my-- now I'm
just going to throw some art up on the screen and
show you some art.
But you're experiencing it.
So, this is some of my work on paper.
I've tried to go beyond just the standard black and white
imagery that I was used to doing some things.
I started out just trimming some edges, making some paper
look old, adding some detail, some gold paint here and
there, getting a little more involved in the shading.
And then after that, I decided to take it
a little bit further.
You can't really see here-- but I'll zoom in--
this little guy has three different layers of paper.
So he's got the eyeball in one, then the main drawing,
then behind it there's a bit more depth.
I extended that a bit more.
This one has a metal needle and like four or five
different layers.
It's kind of bright in here and a lot of
these are kind of dark.
I apologize.
And this one that includes cotton
stuffing, needles, thread.
You can see some of the details here.
And I still do the black and white drawings.
I try to make them a little more elaborate.
I've added a few more shades of gray to
spice them up a bit--
not just light gray.
Some cool grays, some warm grays, some yellowish grays, a
few reds here and there.
And they've gotten a little more complex sometimes.
This is one from a show about brothers.
And some people might have seen this one.
This is the Android brothers having some delicious apple.
[LAUGHTER]
ANDREW BELL: I don't know if you can see that.
It's on water-color paper to give it a little more texture.
And I think I've settled somewhere in the middle.
It's got the deckled edges.
I gave it a little bit of gold on the edges.
And then in the middle there of the head there's a little
gemstone on the paper.
This is recently.
It's kind of where I am these days.
All right, I want to talk a bit about prints, or the
Recession Special.
It's helped me survive that period a few years ago where
everything was pretty rough.
I started a little club where you could pay a monthly fee
and you'd get a print every month.
So that was a way people for to stay engaged with me
without a major commitment, but know they're going to get
something on a regular basis.
And I prints.
Prints are fun to do, they're fun to make, and they're a
great way to translate stuff that is either too expensive,
or too big, or too crazy to otherwise deal with.
There's a painting I did that's, I think, about five
feet tall, over eight feet wide.
Obviously, hard to hang in your New York apartment.
But prints--
good way to translate it.
This is just a lithograph.
Printing gives you so many options.
This is a screen print with many colors.
And the great thing about screen printing is it gives
you some texture options, too.
We did the main colors in flat, and the black outlines
were in a high gloss, contrast black.
So when you see it in person, it really has a
nice feel in the hand.
And these are letterpress prints.
And how they make those is they have these blocks of
metal with the different images on them, and they stamp
them into the paper.
So when you look at them and you look at the paper, it's
actually indented in there.
The inks are impressed in the paper.
So it really gives you a good physical feel-- very different
from the flat screen that we're used to.
I still did some digital stuff.
This is a digital print of a drawing.
But I decided to do each one different.
This is the base one.
So each member of the print club got a different one.
So I'd take the base digital print and draw on it with
pencil and color it to give everyone a little different
experience.
I still love digital, because it lets me do colorful and fun
things quickly and easily.
This is from a recent show, opened two weeks ago in Vienna
called Odd Obst which is about fruit.
I like food.
I like food artwork.
This is some cherries.
This is a fun one of toast.
[LAUGHTER]
ANDREW BELL: And this is probably the most
popular one I've done.
This is called
"Never Look Back." [LAUGHTER]
ANDREW BELL: And it started just as a digital print in a
show in 2005, but it inspired a sequel, "Never Look Back 2,"
and a trequal, and beyond that a toy.
And prints and toys are something that kind of go
great together.
People don't always have room for the toys, or they can't
afford the toys.
But usually there's some wall space.
So if I have a toy coming out, I like to pair it with a print
as an option for collectors.
So speaking of toys.
And I have "toys" in quotes here, because I'm sure most of
you are familiar with adult collectibles that are not toys
for adults.
they're not adult toys.
[LAUGHTER]
ANDREW BELL: They're toys for adults.
There's a very big difference.
And when people ask me what I do these days, I have to be
very specific.
[LAUGHTER]
ANDREW BELL: To me, toys that I put out are sculptures.
They're short run, limited edition sculptures.
And they might be made of vinyl or plastic, but they
might as well be bronzed.
That's how I see them.
This whole scene started probably in the late '90s.
I was working at Nickelodeon when I first saw this stuff.
I had a co-worker who had one of these guys on his desk.
I said, hey, what's that toy or thing on your desk.
And he told me, oh, it's this toy by this
designer in Hong Kong.
This guy on the left here is Eric So and the guy on the
right is Michael Lau.
I was like, oh, that's cool.
Where did you get it?
He told me where he got it.
And he was like, yeah, it was like $120.
What?
You paid $120 for a toy?
You're insane.
So I went down to the store, and then I think I spent $300
on toys that day.
[LAUGHTER]
ANDREW BELL: I had never considered that before.
As an artist, I'd never considered that you could have
something that wasn't a $3,000 metal sculpture or a giant
stone sculpture.
It's somewhere in between a toy for kids and a
piece of fine art.
A lot of them are limited to anywhere from 5 to 500.
So I immediately started working on something.
I started this guy in 2004.
This is my first toy, named Grub.
And the toys that I'd seen up until that point, they were
just little statues.
But I wanted to make it a little more interactive.
So he could swap his faces out depending on your mood and how
you were feeling that day.
My second toy was called Zliks.
And it came as a three set.
And I tried to carry some of that interactivity over.
You could swap their heads out, swap their eyeballs out.
There were different colors, and you could
swap between a few.
But this is when it really clicked to me that I had not
wasted my four years in art schools learning computer art.
Because, oh, 3-D reprinting is now a thing.
It was still pretty expensive and not very accessible when I
started working on this.
But it was when I came full circle, I think.
I was like, oh, hey, I can use what I had learned to do
prototyping.
So we did some color mockups.
And here's that guy, Zliks, another set.
And after that was a guy called the Giver.
And the idea behind this guy was that each one would come
with a gift or a present that he would present to you.
And this is the Giver--
he has the Dumpling of Doom.
This is the Pestilence edition Giver, Dumpling of Doom.
It's cute.
It's still a little dark.
I think that sort of sums up my style.
This was the Giver of War.
It's hard to see here, but the bomb has a big F on it.
So it came with an F bomb.
This one is called the A-Type.
And it was collaboration with a store in New York called My
Plastic Heart.
It was an extrapolation of their logo, which
is a plastic heart.
And he was fun because I used my computer to pre-vis how he
would sit and stand and if he could hang upside down.
This is a recent one called Can of Worms.
And this is the one that just came out
maybe like a week ago.
This is called the Dealmaker.
And he's one of the first Japanese-style, soft vinyl
productions to be made the US.
Until now, most of it's been done in Japan, or there's some
Hong Kong versions of it as well.
But that was made in California, right here.
And this one is coming up, so, spoilers.
This is from my company, Dead Zebra.
And it's about eight inches tall.
It's the chess piece style thing.
His mouth opens.
You can put things inside of it.
And I'm excited about this because it also comes with a
pair of shoes.
[LAUGHTER]
ANDREW BELL: When I go to do something, if I'm in my house
and I need like a new hat or a new table or a new bookshelf,
instead of saying, I'm going to go to Ikea, I
say, can I make one?
Can I go get one made?
So I've always wanted to my own kind of shoes.
But I usually wear Onitsuka Tigers, which is what this is.
So one day I was like, I need a new pair of shoes.
I should see if I can hook up with
them and work on something.
And that will be coming out this summer.
So yeah, working with other companies is always fun.
Sometimes they have a platform that they've already designed
that they give to you to see what you can do with.
This is a Dunny from Kidrobot.
It's been around for awhile.
It's one of the original popular collectibles.
And sometimes you have less to work with.
This is pretty basic, but tried to
translate my art to it.
And then other times, I get to be in control of the platform,
which is nice.
I think you guys are familiar with this.
We'll come back to some Androids.
I've got plenty to show you in a few minutes.
But this is from series one, one of the original ones.
And this is more recent, Sir Knightly Bild.
I still do some sculptures, actual sculptures, one-off
editions, two or three editions.
This is called "Heart Attack." It's a heart just running in a
blood splat.
I'm still obsessed with food.
This was some zombie candy corn.
I did a series of three of four of these.
And they came with little magnets in their feet, so you
could put them on different stands or
stick them on things.
And then last year, I followed that up with a "KillKat," evil
wafers, sort of Siamese twin monsters.
I do some healthy food, too.
Some apples, some evil, apples, some sad apples.
And some more figurative stuff.
It's kind of hard to see this because they're dark.
But this was a small baby creature in a mouse trap.
It's kind of strange, I suppose.
Now that I say it out loud, that sounds kind of horrible.
But even with the sculptures, I try to make it where it's
something that's still practical.
This was a wall-hanging unit.
It came with this guy.
But I did another one that came with nothing, so you
could put your own stuff inside of it,
if you wanted to.
And this guy, you could take his head out and put a cone of
incense in his head and then when lit it up.
And he would smoke out of his eyes.
[LAUGHTER]
ANDREW BELL: And then somewhere in between the
sculpture and the toy is a resin edition.
So you can do a design and then run 30, 40, 100 of them.
It's not quite toy production, it's not quite individual hand
production.
But I like to hand finish them, make each one a little
different, but some weather on them.
These are called "Glob in a Box."
And with the resin production, this is called "The Watcher."
I did this for show.
It's about this big.
It's a pretty good one.
And I took that and I had a few extras made
of the blank resin.
So it's been transformed into various things, including this
bat and an octopus with an egg in his mouth for a show.
This is based off another artist's character called
Scary Girl.
And this guy turned into this.
So there's sort of a subset of the toy and collectible world,
do it yourself.
Pretty popular.
Sometimes you get a figure and you just paint on
it or draw on it.
And other times you get something that's kind of
already set in what it looks like.
This is called Misfortune Cat from [INAUDIBLE].
So I took that guy, I sculpted on top of him, hollowed out
his belly, added a skull, and ended up with this.
And then sometimes they give you some things like this.
It's a station wagon.
They had a show of custom station wagons, which is a
challenge to me because I draw monsters.
I don't draw stationed wagons.
So I strapped a giant monster to the roof.
You might recognize this guy, Stitch.
So I like reimagine things as much as possible instead of
just slapping artwork on something.
So I dismantled poor little Stitch here and reassembled
him into two characters called Mile and Ditch.
So that's some of my artwork.
I hope you will join me in looking at your world a little
differently, maybe deconstruct some things, maybe approach
your food with caution, or sympathy, depending on how you
feel that day.
I'm going to show you guys some Android stuff, if you're
interested.
Anyone?
[LAUGHS]
[APPLAUSE]
ANDREW BELL: All right, how many of you guys have Android
collectibles?
[LAUGHS]
That's pretty much everybody.
I guess you wouldn't be here otherwise, right?
So a few years back, I got the opportunity to start working
on these guys.
If you'd like to hear about it.
Some of our early prototype testing design.
So how it came about is actually through comics,
strangely enough.
My time a Comic-Con was also not wasted.
I got to meet an artist at the small press table doing weird
little comics on the side who also
happened to be a developer.
And he happened to develop for a little
company called Danger.
I don't know if you guys have ever heard of Danger, which
Andy Rubin ran, which later started Android, and the rest
is history.
But my contact with this guy was through Comic-Con.
And our subsequent friendship led to him calling me up one
day and saying, oh, hey, we've got this project at Google.
Maybe we can do some promotional stuff for it.
You make toys--
got any ideas?
I said, yeah, I've got some ideas.
See what we can do.
So I started working on this, a little mini figure here.
This is some of the early concepts.
Top one's basically what we ended up with.
We were trying to figure out what to do with the legs.
As you know, the Android figure itself would probably
just topple over if it was just cylindrical legs.
We tried to maybe make him short, give him a lower center
of gravity, make him round, maybe make them triangular.
But the top one felt the most natural, so we went with that.
These are some of the early designs from series one.
Some of them kind of made it through.
If you're familiar with series one, you can see what they
turned into.
My favorite one on the top right there was
rejected quite quickly.
This was my design.
[LAUGHTER]
ANDREW BELL: I thought it was awesome.
But someone in the Google legal department had other
issues with it.
I don't know why.
I think it should still be made.
So yeah, series one, it was mostly designed by myself.
And it was originally just going to be an internal
promotional giveaway situation, some goodies.
But I said, hey, you know what, there's
this whole toy world.
People might be into this.
People might be interested in this.
Can I make a few more and maybe sell them to them?
And they said, well, whatever.
[LAUGHS]
All right, there was some legal stuff in there.
But theoretically, that's what I heard.
Whatever.
[LAUGHTER]
ANDREW BELL: Do what you want.
It's fine.
So we made a few more.
And I had no idea--
it's a toy based on a brand new mobile operating system
that has a mascot.
I thought either I was going to be stuck with a truckload
of little green figures or it would do really well.
And thankfully, it has done really well and Android is
still around.
These are some of the early designs.
This is CopperBot.
He had a metal finish.
But the original designs were all relatively simple,
straightforward.
Series two-- after that, we got a
few more people involved.
We did some other materials.
So this is Greeneon.
He was a harder plastic.
But he was clear, so you could put stuff in him.
And you guys have probably seen this guy, Noogler.
He was the first Android mini with an accessory slash
different head, the working beanie.
And this was designed by a fellow
Googler called Jeff Yaksick.
He was on the Android team.
And this one by Gary Ham called Cupcake.
He actually smells like a cupcake.
So we're experimenting with stuff like that as well.
And series three, we continued that.
I invited a few more artists to work on different series.
And we changed the arm design from a standard little peg to
a round ball and cup design, which gives it a little more
freedom, a little more expression.
This is by my friend Kelly Denato.
She's done some great artwork.
It's called Pandroid, with the pan flute.
And my friend Sket, the 8 Ball Hustler.
I think this was the first one with a hat--
not the last.
And then this was one from series three.
They all came with a little mini one inside.
And one this was a favorite from series three by Matt.
It came with a little ball.
So you could pull his head off and put the ball in and shake
it like a real spray can.
And beyond the artist series, we do quite a few for Google
internal departments and promotions.
This is for analytics.
I think the analysts ones, they're really simple, but
they're some of my favorite designs.
This is the first one.
And then, of course, they upgraded their interface, so
this is a more recent one.
And this one has proven to be very popular.
They gave it away at South by Southwest.
It's really simple.
It's really basic.
But people just really love it.
It's Schemer from the Schemer Project.
This is for the mobile ad unit--
Mobley the Ad Man.
Came with a little fedora and a little Nexus phone.
And this, I've just been informed, you can only win if
you do good work on the UX team.
[LAUGHS]
A lot of the other ones are given away at events or for
departmental things.
But this one seems allusive.
Anyone go into I/O?
Well, you might be get one of these guys.
This is the I/O Tester.
He's a cross between a crash test dummy and a developer.
Oh, they're the same thing, right?
So he comes with little safety goggles and a
fade in the I/O colors.
Hopefully it'll be enough to go around.
And if we've got some coming here, too.
Aw!
What's up next Android minis?
I brought some samples.
[LAUGHTER]
ANDREW BELL: So people really like the clear ones.
They like they can take their heads off.
They like they can put stuff inside of them.
And so this is the next set coming out.
It's called the rainbow series.
And it comes in this awesome box, which is
also a display case.
It flips open.
[APPLAUSE]
ANDREW BELL: And [INAUDIBLE].
It's got one sparkly.
It's got sparkles.
We haven't embedded sparkles in one before,
so that was a first.
And then, coming up later this year, is series four.
It'll be coming out probably late summer, early fall.
Looking at August, September probably.
And now I believe I'm going to get grilled with some
questions from the audience and from online.
AUDIENCE: All right, let's give it up for Andrew.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: Say your name and your question.
AUDIENCE: My name is Alex.
I worked here at Google.
And I'm a big fan of your toys.
And one thing I discovered when I bought one on eBay was
that it was a knockoff.
And I was wondering, how do you guys approach knockoffs?
How do you prevent them from happening?
And what's your take on that?
ANDREW BELL: It's hard.
In some cases, it's impossible.
AUDIENCE: Just don't buy them.
ANDREW BELL: What's that?
Just don't by them?
Well, that's was part of it.
I mean, people do buy them.
Series one came out and was popular, and series two came
out and was popular.
And naturally, some factories saw that and were like, hey,
let's just make some of those.
So pretty soon there were some really crappy copies out on
the market.
One way we helped prevent it is I had to switch factories.
That factory you saw in the video was a brand new factory,
a brand new building we had.
Because series two, there were some extras, some dubious
quality ones that were slipping out the back door
from the factory that I was contracted to earlier.
Now I have a tightly controlled supply chain where
it's just me and the guy that runs the factory.
And we keep the designs down.
And then there's the occasional cease and desist.
And people in Hong Kong and China tend to ignore those.
Or light fires with them.
Luckily, I have a representative over there who
tries to stay on top of that.
But I think the best way to combat it is to make better,
higher quality, and keep innovating.
Like series three, we added the ball joint arms.
I haven't seen anyone copy that.
It's too expensive, not worth it.
The paint quality we have on the newer ones, you can't copy
it for the price that they want for the fake ones.
So that's probably best way, is just to outdo them.
Thanks.
AUDIENCE: Bringing in other artists-- how did that start?
Was it just like, hey, I'm running up ideas.
Can someone help me out?
Or were you working with some other artists that you thought
could contribute?
ANDREW BELL: Well, the whole collectible scene, the toy
scene, is based off of that-- different artists working on
different platforms and working together.
So while series one was mostly me, just proof of concept,
series two, I wanted to get some people from Google
involved, use some of their designs.
And then series three was more getting other artists that I
know and other friends that I have.
And it's finding people whose artwork and style would work
well with the Android figure itself.
Not everyone can design for a limited palette
or a limited size.
AUDIENCE: This one from Mike L. in Louisville, Kentucky.
So there's Cupcake--
why were there no other designs [INAUDIBLE]?
ANDREW BELL: After that?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
ANDREW BELL: There are plans.
It has been discussed over the years--
you keep making fun version names, and we'll
keep working on plans.
So hopefully in the next couple
years we'll see something.
AUDIENCE: When you first decided you wanted to start
making toys, were you working with somebody else who had
already made them, or did you figure out the process?
Because that looked really involved.
I didn't realize how involved it was.
ANDREW BELL: Yeah, it took awhile to learn.
My first idea was just, I'm going to make a toy.
I didn't let myself get discouraged when I realize how
impossible that was.
I was going to toy conventions-- there's the toy
fair every year that's been going on for
years in New York--
going to toy stores--
the guy who runs the shop in New York that has those toys
that I first saw-- say, hey, where do you get your stuff?
Who makes these things?
And eventually, I managed to find some connections to some
people that were more familiar with the process.
And they helped me through the first one.
And then after, tried to do most of it myself after that.
And now, having been at the factory and intimately
familiar the process, it makes it easier to design toys
knowing the technical limitations and how things
actually get made.
It was research, talking to people, schmoozing.
I'm not good at it, but I was persistent, so it worked.
AUDIENCE: All right, our next question from the Dori and the
public forums was from JF Isla, in Riverside.
Will you ever consider letting fans submit designs for one of
your series, because I have a couple in mind?
Wink, wink.
[LAUGHTER]
ANDREW BELL: A lot of people have a lot of good ideas.
I don't know.
Fan sourcing is difficult.
Because a lot of times you get a lot of things like Pokemon
or Ultraman.
There's some really cute designs, some really stuff.
But a lot of it's not as fun and creative as it could be
and could never get made for copyright reasons.
But I think it'd be fun to have a contest where we do
some fan stuff.
I'd certainly like to get more Google people involved in
future series.
Maybe we'll have an internal company contest.
AUDIENCE: Get working.
ANDREW BELL: Get some of those creative minds going.
AUDIENCE: We've got some artists here.
ANDREW BELL: Yeah.
Yeah, I think that would be fun.
AUDIENCE: A bunch of people on the public G+ are asking if,
not the whole presentation, because it kind of shows the
new design, but the beginning of the presentation is going
to be put online so they can--
on the public G+?
ANDREW BELL: Yeah, I think most the stuff up until the
secret stuff, we'll have it up there.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
AUDIENCE: All right, this one is from our Googler Matt.
Do you have any fun stories behind any of
your Android designs?
ANDREW BELL: Not too funny.
Not the ones I can talk about, at least.
Some of the fun ones are the ones that get canned, like the
Blue Screen of Death one.
But nothing too crazy.
AUDIENCE: So the next question is from myself.
Did you think it would sell beyond series one when you
[INAUDIBLE]?
I think partially answered [INAUDIBLE].
ANDREW BELL: Yeah, I don't think anyone here or myself
knew if people would want a phone mascot as a collectible
or to spend money on something that is essentially a
marketing tool, when you think about it.
But yeah, I had no idea it would as popular, as big, or
go on as long as it has.
I'm happy for it.
And I'd like to keep doing it.
AUDIENCE: All right, another question, from Yani G. And I'm
sorry, I'm only going to go there, Yani, if you're here.
There's been some frustration from the collector's community
recently about the recent designs being very similar to
each other, all differing by the lettering or the scrolls.
What is your take on this?
ANDREW BELL: He's referring to one specific.
He's referring to the Chinese Near Year edition, where it
came with a little scroll.
Each one had a different printed saying on it, seven
different ones so you didn't know which one you would get.
I think it's just part of collecting.
In one way, from a technical financial standpoint, you need
to make variations of things to keep the cost of the
crazier ones down.
Now, for every plain blue are plain green Android, I can
make that crazy one that had 100 prints on it.
Because it averages it out.
But I understand this can be frustrating for completists to
find something, or when things are similar to each other.
But I think it's part of the game.
AUDIENCE: This one is from external.
Jonathan, from Brooklyn.
I think you answered it.
Would you consider doing a five inch or eight inch?
ANDREW BELL: Yeah, definitely.
Yes.
Yes, I would consider it.
I think that ones more about 10 inches.
Is that right?
AUDIENCE: Also, a part of this question is, do you also to do
a DIY, do-it-yourself, Android?
ANDREW BELL: Yeah, have plans for a do-it-yourself large
version, too.
So I expect to see some pretty crazy electronic versions of
that, because there's more room to fit more Servos and
things inside.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
ANDREW BELL: Well, we're starting with the green and
the outline.
And then hopefully we'll be able to maybe translate some
of the existing designs onto the bigger platform.
Printing gets harder at that scale.
Printing's actually easier the small you get.
So we'll see.
Maybe some of the simpler ones.
AUDIENCE: Makes sense.
All right, just a few more questions here.
From Alex A., here at Google--
how hard is it to narrow down which designs you end up using
for each series?
ANDREW BELL: As you saw on that whole chart of the series
three ones, it's tough to decide.
Sometimes I decide through those criteria of copyright
possibility, technical things.
And then other times, it's just a gut feeling, like
what's going to work well with other
designs that I've gotten.
Or has this artist had like three
designs in the last series?
So there's no real formula, just how it feels and how it
feels in context.
AUDIENCE: I think this has also been answered from Alex.
The [INAUDIBLE]
bigger things for the future Androids.
And I think you showed us what.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: So he's thinking ahead, obviously.
ANDREW BELL: We're always working on stuff.
AUDIENCE: Good questions, though.
Good questions.
So do you know it takes three to six months for a single
project to come alive, these figurines, from the design
phase, and he goes, working with manufacturing and
everything.
And he works with multiple projects at the same time.
I contacted him back in January of this year and said,
hey, Andrew.
Do you want to come and have a talk?
A bunch of people would love to have you.
Without hesitation, he said, yes, I'll do it.
So I applaud his loyalty and commitment.
[APPLAUSE]
ANDREW BELL: He promised me free lunch.
That's why I showed up.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: You could come every month.
Andrew is a pretty big fan of, obviously, art and everything.
And he also appreciates our doodle.
I've seen him treating nice doodles and what we create.
So we got something really simple from our Doodle team.
[INAUDIBLE].
ANDREW BELL: Oh, awesome.
Thank you.
AUDIENCE: So you could open it up if you would like.
ANDREW BELL: I'm not going to wait.
I was never good at that.
Oh, that's awesome.
AUDIENCE: So this is an artist's proof from our
Doodler [INAUDIBLE].
ANDREW BELL: Oh, cool.
That's great.
Done in the Haring style.
That's awesome.
Thank you very much.
AUDIENCE: You're welcome.
We hope you like it.
[APPLAUSE]