Leap Frog is the resulting project from a personal challenge which was to design a product based on the three topics picked out of a hat to improve on creative and innovative design skills. The topics chosen were "drone", "children", and "frog". This project is a drone aimed for users in the age range of 6-10 years.

I set myself a personal challenge to work on my creative design skills in which I put numerous topics into a hat and had to pick three at random. The three topics that were chosen were "drone", "children", and "frog". As a result of this I decided to base my designs around drones with the theme of frogs, aimed at children as my consumers.

- Tomás McGee

The design of the drone is based on a lily pad in which frogs tend to leap to and from as well as rest on. The colour of green played a key factor as it linked in with lily pads, frogs, and it's a nice bright colour to attract a child's attention. The bars around the drone body are aimed to resemble a lily pad and are effective as an accessory to hang objects from when travelling from one location to another. The bars are also viewed as a handle for children with less gripping to prevent those users from dropping their drones. The body of the drone that compacts all its electrical features is also aimed to resemble a miniature lily pad.

- Tomás McGee

The drone has four carbon fibre propellers which will fly it to its locations. Some extra features that are expected to be added if it is taken further for development include cameras, music, and LED lights. Overall this drone is a simplistic model of the much more high tech drones as it is aimed at children that wish to become more comfortable with them before moving onto the more powerful ones which adults tend to use.

- Tomás McGee

The main reason for this project was to challenge my creative skills for designing under pressure. The idea of picking out of the hats I like as it limits my key areas to focus my design on therefore challenging me even more. I got the idea of this from other designers that I have seen to use them as warmup techniques, I also had to use this technique for a project in college back in my first year of studies in which I ended up having to design a high end toilet roll holder. A crazy idea to think but I surprisingly came out with numerous designs from it.

- Tomás McGee

One thing I have learned in the past with design which resulted in me spending even more time at the conceptualization stage is that all designs are not where they should be at first, even when we designers may think it! As a result of this it got me thinking to myself "all good designs are criticized at first, otherwise they were never a good design", I once said it to a friend and it has stuck with him too, its a personal quote of mine that i have on my mind always when working with design.

- Tomás McGee

About Tomás McGee

Tomás McGee is a third year Product Design (Marketing & Innovation) student in Maynooth University. He strives to use both his creativity and logical thinking to create attractive, user-based solutions to his projects, and am at best when working as part of a team. You can find more of his works on his Behance profile.