Creo Customers: RKS Harnesses Emotion and Creo to Build Hot Guitar

By Geoff Hedges | Published: June 21, 2011

If design firm RKS is right, your guitar defines you. It signals your aspirations, affirms your identity, and brings meaning to your life. And if you think that all sounds a bit overboard, you’re clearly not a guitar player. People can form emotional connections to their musical instruments and, according to RKS, everything else—from security cameras to water bottles. RKS has spent decades researching how those bonds form. “It’s not just how you feel about the design or experience,” says John Kiehle. “It’s how the product makes you feel about yourself.”

RKS uses a unique approach to concept design that harnesses the power of emotion in consumer behavior. The Psycho Aesthetics method draws on the writings of Joseph Campbell and Abraham Maslow to ensure all of RKS designs pack an emotional punch. It also draws on Creo to ensure those concepts get captured and manufactured.



Does it work? RKS is consistently regarded as one of the top 10 industrial design firms in North America,
with clients like Amana, Nokia, JBL, and RKS Guitars.

Creo Sketch: Free Sketching Software for Concept Design

By Geoff Hedges | Published: August 3, 2011

The napkin sketch. We hear about it a lot when we talk about design innovation. Despite sophisticated design tools, many great ideas still start as scratchings on a diner or barroom napkin–the nearest tool available when inspiration came.

But napkins have their drawbacks. They tear, they fade, they don’t really help you draw curves.
Those drawbacks are especially obvious when you see what Creo Sketch can do:  It’s made for the moments when you’re more of a visionary than a technician. It costs less than most napkins,  it’s FREE to download and use, includes freehand drawing tools, and doesn’t require any special CAD expertise to use.


In this quick demo, Paul Sagar shows how to:

• Sketch a freehand object in pencil.
• Overlay  rough curves with smooth, adjustable curves.
• Use curves for masks, as he airbrushes color onto his object.
• Add highlights and strategic erasing.

One more better-than-napkin characteristic of Creo Sketch: You can load the sketch or artwork into your other Creo apps when your idea graduates to the next level. Use it for starting 2D drawings and 3D models.

Creo Sketch, our sketching software for concept design,  is available now, dowload your copy at www.ptc.com/go/sketch

Creo 1.0: New FreeStyle capabilities demonstrated

By Geoff Hedges | Published: July 21, 2011

In a recent post, we showed you how Creo Sketch could replace the familiar napkin when you want to capture your earliest design ideas. If you’re a Creo Parametric user, the natural next step would be to turn that 2D idea into a 3D model. Unfortunately, while you’re still working on a concept design, you may not yet want to commit to a detailed parametric model.

No matter. Creo Parametric now includes FreeStyle, a set of capabilities that you use to quickly create fast flexible surface modeling either directly, or by simply working with your 2D sketch, and pushing and pulling your concept into a 3D form. The curved continuous surfaces you create can then be reused later for the detailed 3D design.



In this demo, Paul Sagar, PTC director of product management, shows you how to use FreeStyle design capabilities to:

• Bring in a 2D sketch with trace sketch
• Position and scale it
• Push and pull a primitive to match the 2D sketch
• Turn on symmetry
• Punch a hole
• Add/extrude new geometry
• Offset faces
• Add fillets
• Perform a reflection analysis
• Thicken the model walls
• Handle a last-minute change

Remember, FreeStyle is not a module or an add on. It’s part of every Creo Parametric App. That means if you’re using Creo Parametric already, you’ve got all the tools you need to start experimenting with these new capabilities.

Creo Customers: RKS Reimagines the Water Bottle

By Geoff Hedges | Published: June 29, 2011

In a recent post, I talked about RKS and its innovative guitars. Guitars are cool in general, but RKS made them even cooler with its customizable electric axes. World-class musicians responded. Did you see those photos of Bauhaus and the Rolling Stones holding RKS guitars? RKS has made a philosophy of creating designs that make you feel good about yourself, and RKS guitars certainly fit that bill. But how would the company’s “psycho aesthetic concept design” apply to a less-flashy project? Say, a water bottle? RKS took the ‘gloves off’ when it came to the KOR hydration vessel.

The KOR takes the water bottle concept beyond throwaway plastic containers with screw tops, turning them into “sustainable personal hydration” products. The bottles open with one hand, have caps that won’t get lost, and use environmentally sensitive materials. Plus they look chic.




Behind RKS product designs is Creo Direct. That’s because a company that prides itself on creativity and innovation can’t skimp on the concept design phase of product development, they need to have tools that help them unlock their full creative potential.  Creo Direct offers a flexible approach to CAD that lets designers try out new ideas, share them, and respond to feedback quickly and easily.

The KOR has been a success, winning awards and spawning follow on projects for KOR and RKS. Still, some of you want to see it next to a celebrity, don’t you? For you, there’s this photo from Iron Man 2.