Stuf Studio

Developmental Stuf Concept & Sketches

In the first month, to say that baby vision is “blurry” is an understatement. A baby’s nervous system simply isn’t fully prepared to focus on their new environment. What does cut through the haze are moving objects and high-contrast objects that are broadly patterned in black, white and red. Hold up an object like this and you’ll get a thrill seeing baby react and you’ll be increasing his/her ability to focus on these exciting new objects.

The idea of doing a line of Stuf within a simple, graphic world of red, black and white was inviting enough, but the thought of making something that would help infants begin to see, for the first time, the world around them, made the prospect irresistible. Two years ago Stuf Studio teamed with the fun baby gift makers at Wry Baby and began to brainstorm the idea of a visually stimulating art doll line for babies. And that’s how Developmental Stuf was born.

Together we ran through pages and pages of preliminary sketches looking for patterns and textures that were intriguing and bold, engaging but simple. From walls covered in full size mock-ups and paper dummies, we narrowed our choices down to base shapes that launched the Development line:  Dots, Stripes, Triangles, Hexagons and Rings.

Once designs were finalized and inked, it was our friends at Wry Baby that suggested we not stop at just making Developmental Stuf visually appealing. We began sourcing interesting sounds to sew into our designer plush dolls. Eventually we found just the right bell to add and just the right fill material to give baby hours of satisfying, paper-crinkling joy.

And that’s not the end of Developmental Stuf’s production story. We plan to add new patterns and sounds in the near future, expanding the line and making sure it always stays visually interesting.

See the whole line of Developmental Stuf art toys.