Institute of Design, IIT: Roger Sweet interview

Roger Sweet, M.S. 1960

Interview with the Institute of Design, September 2005

Before his legendary work at Mattel, Inc., Roger Sweet spent thirteen years as a general consumer designer, creating products for Rubbermaid and Hoover and packaging for Downy fabric softener and Scope mouthwash. In 1975 Fortune named the Scope bottle design one of the 50 best packages of the twentieth century. Beginning in 1980 while he was a lead designer at Mattel, Sweet originated the concept and design for "He-Man and the Masters Of The Universe", which went on to become one of the hallmark action toy properties of the 1980s.

ID: Tell us how you came to ID, how you found out about it, and what led you to study design.

I had always been artistically inclined, but I didn’t want to be a starving artist in a garret. I grew up in Akron, Ohio. At that time Akron was the rubber capital of the world: Goodyear, Goodrich, Firestone, Seiberling and General Tire were all there.

I was a junior in college at Miami University, taking a liberal arts course of study, and my dad, who was art director at Firestone Tire & Rubber, came home with an Industrial Design magazine and said, "This looks like a neat way to go." The instant I looked at it, a bell rang in my head, mainly because at the time -- this was in 1956 -- automobiles were being designed pretty wildly, with all the chrome, big and flashy and everything, and I thought it’d be really neat to style automobiles.

From this I became aware that products were designed by people. I’ve always loved doing things in three dimensions that you can actually handle. Who could have known I would have been good at it or liked it so much! But it really was the right fit.

There was a design firm in Akron by the name of Smith, Scherr and McDermott. My sister had gone to school with Gene Smith, one of the principals. In another year I was going to graduate from undergraduate school at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. So I went to Smith, Scherr and McDermott and talked to the people there, including Gene Smith. I asked him what school he would recommend most highly for design, and he recommended the Institute of Design, particularly because Jay Doblin was the director of it. Jay was a big gun at the ASID [American Society of Industrial Designers] at the time, and a very prominent design personality.

I could tell you all about Jay. He was one terrific, colorful personality. He’d been raised in the New York metropolitan area, I think in Brooklyn, and he was a real street-smart guy, kind of had a Brooklyn accent, but he was super bright. He was a very avid jazz guitarist and a close friend of one of the famous jazz guitarists of that day, Johnny Smith. One time, for a charity benefit, Jay made this incredible geometric, spatial sculpture out of brass, square rods and circular parts. He was standing there in the model shop brazing these parts together, and I said, "Boy, that looks really difficult." And he said, "Theoretically, it’s impossible." [Laughter].

But not for Jay?

But not for Jay. He was just a tremendously bright guy and a very lovable guy too. And very multi-faceted. I’ll tell you, he was one in a million.

[ID has recently established an endowed fellowship fund in memory of Jay Doblin and his immeasurable impact on the school.]

So you came to ID the following year, in 1957?

I was there from September ’57 to June ’59, and then in October of ’59 I went in for National Guard active duty, and got out in April. During that time I received my Masters diploma [in 1960].

Can you tell us a little about some of your favorite classes, or some of the most influential things you learned at ID?

ID’s approach to design was "creative conceptualization". They placed very little emphasis on styling and sketching and rendering ability. And I’ll tell you, there were guys at the school who were terrific designers but couldn’t sketch or render at all. At that time, about 90% of the industrial design profession involved styling products. So sketching, rendering and styling skills were extremely important in the industry, and some people felt we were a little short-changed in that respect at the Institute of Design. In comparison, the Art Center College of Design -- at that time in Los Angeles, now in Pasadena -- concentrated very strongly in those areas. I had 18 designers from there in my group at Mattel when I was creating and designing He-Man and the Masters Of The Universe and other stuff, and those guys were out of this world at styling, sketching and rendering. On the other hand I felt they were sometimes a little weak at conceptualization. However, a tremendously creative guy in my group, Dave McElroy, was an Art Center graduate. So, really, I think exceptional creativity in an individual comes from a person’s perceptivity and viewpoints as a being, and not from his education.

How was that taught? How did you and your classmates learn to conceptualize effectively?

I learned to conceptualize by doing, and by trial and error. Also, the more one does something with a passion, and really looking carefully, the better he gets at it. We are talking about hard, but loving, work. But, let me tell you how I learned to sketch and render. I would look in magazines -- Car Styling magazine, Industrial Design magazine which had photos from Art Center -- and I would see these little sketches and renderings. I would analyze the technique, and I picked up sketching and rendering that way. In relation to styling, mostly we just got projects where we were assigned specific products or general product areas to originate and then style a product. So we actually learned by doing, which is to me the best way to learn.

While I was in school I had in my portfolio three projects. One was a handheld electric mixer. It had the motor in a housing and then a flexible shaft going to a separate, lightweight handle with the two beaters on it. This took most of the weight of the mixer off the hand, which I thought was a good solution, and then I styled it up. At first, as I knew little about styling, I just looked around at all the other products on the market. At that time the greatest aesthetic emphasis in product design in any school was at Pratt Institute. So I would get Pratt catalogs and take a look at their forms. I learned something about styling from that, as well.

I also had a self-propelled water toy. The germ of that idea was given to me by Jay. He said, "Design a self-propelled water vehicle." I came up with this toy, or you could also call it a "leisure time entertainment vehicle", that straps on to your waist, and the hull of it projects up in front of your chest. It’s sort of shaped like a boat, only goes up about as high as your face, and this thing is a hollow container. So, if you’re vertical in the water it acts like a life preserver. Coming off each side at the front was a hand crank, and it had a propeller underneath, so you’d crank the hand cranks, like a bicycle, to turn the propeller and go through the water.

Sounds like fun.

It was fun! In fact I constructed a very rough prototype and took it to a local swimming pool. It worked fine, except I accidentally had it geared so when you cranked it in the normal way, you went backwards! [Laughter] But that was OK because I just wanted to make sure the concept actually worked, and it did. It was a very fun deal! Hey, if you can’t have fun doing product design, what can you have fun doing?

And then the third project I worked on was a package design. The National Set-up Paper Box Association had come to ID. They sponsored a competition among the students to come up with the best set-up paper box type package. There are two types of boxes. You know, a folding paper box is just a box made out of a flat sheet of cardboard, glued together where the ends join, and you just fold it and it becomes a box. But a set-up paper box has a cardboard, fairly rigid structure, with separate, usually decorative paper folded and glued around the outside, like a Christmas package. They were two separate industries.

So Jay Doblin said, "Just pick some item and design a package around it." I had seen some Dansk tableware that had black, rounded handles with brushed pewter-like metal working ends. I took a complete set of tableware and designed a hexagonal package that would hold all six implements. Looking down from the top the package you had six equilateral triangles, which when it was closed it formed a solid hexagon. But you could open it up and display it a dozen different ways just by standing it up or laying it down. You could make it freeform or make the insides point outward in a regular, outward-pointing Star of David-type configuration.

It won first place in the competition. But here’s the kicker. There were six or seven other designs that were also very good and they all won first place too! [Laughter] A point can be made about that: every time you have a winner, somebody loses. That was a really nice competition because everybody won. The entire way that our society is set up is with winners and losers. And that’s sort of a shame.

It sounds from some of your stories like you were very proactive in augmenting your own education.

Oh yeah. And there were a lot of other guys at the school who weren’t. They just took what was given to them. But I felt it would be really important in the field to actually be fairly multifaceted, even though overall in school at ID I was wet behind the ears.

I’m not saying this to be bragging, but Jay Doblin once told one of my fellow students at ID that I was the best student in the school. When I heard this I was amazed, because I felt incredibly inadequate and inexperienced as a designer at the time I heard this. Here I was wet behind the ears, and Jay Doblin had so many years of experience at the top design firm in the country, Raymond Loewy. He knew all about things like manufacturing processes, which I knew nothing about. I got a book on manufacturing methods and processes with lots of excellent photos and diagrams and became very familiar with that. And later on when I got into the field I spent three years doing straight design engineering, and two years doing international operations engineering. One of the reasons I could be so creative on the He-Man / Masters Of The Universe product was because I had a tremendous mechanical background, in addition to being able to see new directions.

There’s no substitute in product design for having a really well-founded manufacturing methods and operations background. Of course it depends on the area you’re working in, too. I designed containers and packaging for three years. That’s a field that requires some technical expertise, so I got very technically proficient in particular manufacturing methods and processes like blow molding and glass forming and plastic vacuum forming, and how folding and set-up paper boxes are made and things like that. I worked for Walter Dorwin Teague Associates in New York, in the technical packaging group. Their main client was Procter & Gamble. I designed containers for Procter & Gamble, Anderson Clayton, General Foods and other companies.

Did you find your project work at ID helped you when you got to Mattel?

Yes it did, although I spent 13 years doing general consumer product design before I got to Mattel in 1972. I was 37 by then. I had had a tremendous opportunity to learn a lot of disciplines. Just before Mattel I spent six years doing aircraft interiors, working on the Boeing 747 jumbo jet. It was longer than the Wright Brothers’ first flight, and the inside diameter was 20 feet, seven inches! I led the industrial design work on an under-floor galley system for United and American Airlines, I was in charge of parts of the flight deck -- I always pushed to get into very technically oriented areas. There were guys who were satisfied designing wall panels and partitions, but I tried to steer clear of that whenever I could, and get into more complex, challenging projects.

Those Boeing designs were probably used for the next 20, 30, or 40 years, weren’t they?

Absolutely. I see exactly the same designs in the Boeing 747 now that we designed in the late ‘60s. To get that design, for example the wall panels, there were several new materials involved, like polycarbonate. That was an unknown material, and there were some problems with it for a while.

When I worked on the [original] Downy bottle [at left], it was the first bottle ever designed that had a handle that flowed with the form of the bottle. That bottle revolutionized the blow molding industry. Before that all bottles were pretty much rectangular and had a spindly little handle on one side, near the top shoulder. The Downy bottle for the first time had an off-center orifice handle at the top, which had never been done before. That was about 1964, when I was at Teague [on the Procter & Gamble account].

I’ll tell you, Procter & Gamble was an incredibly lucrative account. It’s interesting, I heard one reason Teague lost that account was that Procter & Gamble wanted them to start designing using the computer, and Teague didn’t want to. At least that’s the rumor I heard. Whether it’s really true, I don’t know. When I was there designing containers, we would make a clay model and then dip it in a tank of water, and how much water spilled out was how we determined the volume of the bottle. Nowadays you can determine exactly what the volume of a container is on the computer, and do it very easily. Computers have made truly great advances in how products are designed and developed through to production. I find them absolutely magical, I love them!

By the way, I’m very proficient at [computer-aided design]. I’ve spent a lot of time in the last three years on the computer learning those programs, working on whatever I want to. Also, I spent a year designing a new male action toy line, which I haven’t been able to sell, but I’ll tell you, it blows away anything else on the market, by a long shot. But pretty much nowadays [to sell a toy line] you need a strong entertainment property behind it. That’s a shame, because He-Man and Masters was an internally-generated concept, so it saved Mattel from having to pay royalties to an outside inventor.

But you know it’s funny, when Filmation did the cartoon of He-Man/Masters, they originated some of their own characters, and Mattel ended up having to pay them royalties! But Filmation was a tremendous benefit to Mattel in terms of promoting that line, so in a way they deserved the royalties.

How is your book [Mastering The Universe: He-man And The Rise And Fall Of A Billion-dollar Idea] doing?

It’s apparently doing well, but it’s extremely difficult to get numbers from any source, including from Emmis [the publisher]. I heard it was the best-selling book Emmis published for one week, and that’s the last I heard about it. I have no idea how well it’s done. Apparently in the publishing industry that’s pretty much standard operating procedure not to disclose exact sales numbers.

So you designed the entire He-Man property yourself?

What I always say is, I originated and named He-Man, and originated the general concept of the Masters Of The Universe. I constructed three prototype figures at nine and a half inches, which I first showed at a product conference at Mattel in late 1980. These three prototype figures brought He-Man into existence. They were all of He-Man in different themes and configurations. One had a barbarian theme from the ancient past (low tech), another had a current military enhanced theme (mid tech), and the other one had a futuristic military, a la Star Wars, enhanced theme (high tech), showing that He-Man can go anywhere, and do anything, at any time, in any theme. These figures were nine and a half inches tall, and the figures in the line from 1982-87 [photo at left] were five and a half inches. But I knew if I showed these figures at the height they ended up being, I would have a very poor chance of selling the concept, so I made them very tall, huge, and very impressive.

I read that Masters sold 55 million figures. In all its different product variations it sold supposedly over $2 billion worth of product. I also read that the Mattel Masters product sold $1.2 billion world-wide, and over $800 million of that was in the U.S.

What was the initial reaction to the models at that internal conference?

Very non-committal. There were three other concepts shown by other members of the design group, of which I was a member. Ray Wagner [the president] ran the show. The different members showed their concepts and when we were all finished, Wagner said all the concepts should be market-tested for preference. But then right at the end of the meeting he pointed to my models and said, "Those have the power."

And nobody said a thing or batted an eye. But the next day marketing was after me to start developing that line. There was a guy who was a vice president of engineering and visual design who wanted to take the line over from my preliminary design group and develop it. This was totally counter to Mattel policy. Mattel had always let our prelim group develop products from concept to a working prototype, an illustration, and then a preliminary name plus a cost. Then we passed it on to the visual design department to develop in conjunction with engineering. But this vice president in charge of engineering and visual design got Ray Wagner’s permission to take the product over and develop the line just after I’d done these three prototypes.

How did you feel about that?

I thought... that’s the way the ball bounces. [Laughs] It’s like, hey. I’ve had a lot of different experiences throughout my career and this was just another experience. Also, after what I’ve seen, nothing surprises me. Although my boss told me to get off the He-Man project altogether, I worked on the concept for two or three months on the sly with visual design to develop it, and worked with marketing to develop the general direction of the characters. It was a very dicey period. Here was a line that was so different, nobody knew where it would go or what would happen next, it could have been dropped at any time, and here I am spending two or three months on it. My prelim statistics for the year were very low, and your raises and compensation in those days was based on statistics: dollars worth of products in the line, how many concepts presented, how many illustrations done. And I’m spending all my time on the side working on He-Man. But, it was a big gamble on my part that paid off.

You ultimately had a huge impact on a lot of young people, myself included.

The way I conceived these guys, they were very gutsy. Later on a lot of different designers got their hands on them and made them much more pre-school-y, or weakened the line in other ways. But my original prototypes were three huge, tough guys. My concentration was to make the thing appeal as much to adults as to kids. The line evolved to go younger, when I would have preferred it more adult, like Star Wars, or Spawn [which appeal more to collectors as well]. It would have had a much broader base. If you design something really gutsy and appealing to a man as much as a boy, little kids will love it too.

When I was a kid there was no such thing as pre-school. When you were a boy, you were a "small man". Nowadays psychology has taken over, all this childhood development stuff, and now kids are treated like little boys and babies, rather than men. When I was growing up, even when we were very young, we were treated like young men. Kids were not coddled. That had a great bearing on my originating He-Man. Where I grew up in Akron, Ohio, with the rubber factories, there were thousands of guys there who were factory laborers, and they were tough guys. And I saw a lot of tough stuff happen. And I’ll tell you another thing. I’ve always been slender. And when I saw or got into tough situations happening, there were many times I wished I was a He-Man. That had a very strong bearing on my originating this concept.

--interview by Vincent LaConte and Rebecca Hoffman

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