Relevant details for consumer electronic product design

One day in June when my wife and I strolled down the street in Quebec City during our vacation, a company’s sign caught her attention. It says Advanta Design Industriel. She guessed it must be an industrial design firm. We peeped through the window and, yes, it is a design studio with people working in there. She wanted me to take a picture of the sign for our vacation memory, but I thought why bother, I have seen so many design firms in the U.S.

After the trip, I decided to google the company and found its website. Wow, Bang! This company does put out some good stuff on its site that is worth noting. Mainly you will find it make itself very resourceful regarding the mechatronic design if you go to its expertise page. Right there you will get a glimpse of what an industrial designer needs to know about the details as well as inner working for the electronic products they may design. For example, a designer can learn:

1)      How the clear or translucent lightpipe can work as a conduit for transmitting LED light from PCB board to exterior control/display panel. I consider lightpipe design is crucial to dictate the locations of LED lights on control/display panel as in many projects I have to deal with this issue. It is related to PCB layout and physical sizes and locations of LEDs.

2)      How thin walls can be designed and molded. Thin wall plastic enclosure sometimes are created inevitably even engineers will suggest a designer not to. Here Advanta gives you the idea on how to make the thin wall design works – by using high pressure injection molding to increase the mold flow speed or by choosing the right resin to facilitate the mold flow.

3)      Soft touch overmolding – as the demand for good gripping on the handheld products escalates, the textured and soft touch are becoming the de facto finishing of product exterior surfaces. You will see TPE (thermoplastic elastomer) type of materials like Kraton or Santoprene are widely used in creating these soft touch gripping surfaces.

4)      Overmolding that in some cases combines soft and hard materials into one single part. Overmolding is prevalent in many product details where reducing the abrasion between components in an assembly or creating inmold decoration is required.

These design details featured in Advanta’s expertise page will be relevant to many industrial designers and will certainly help inspire them to unleash their creativities for more design options that take roots in gracious details.