A branding exercise to challenge gender stereotypes

A Robot Made This! is a package and brand prototype I created after reading about a friend’s young daughter who was beginning to think she had to choose between liking technology and being girly. I mailed her this prototype in response. I wanted to show her how technology could serve girls and could do things that were considered “girly,” like make sparkly jewelry, which is exactly what I was doing in my spare time. (They don’t call me the laser princess for nothing!)
I used a laser cutter to make both the pendant and the display card. The pendant design is cut out of iridescent plastic that changes colors with the light, and the etching on it sparkles. I came up with a package design with a robot reaching over the top of a regular jewelry card, with its manipulators around the attachment points for the necklace, as if the robot had just finished making it and was now handing it to the girl. It includes mechanical design elements, holographic paper, pink, swirly text and lace. The robot is vaguely feminine but not super feminine – it’s just a machine, not a Fembot or Rosie from the Jetsons. The declaration “A Robot Made This!” is written in a mix of typefaces that convey femininity and ties to technology. The holographic paper tells you the product has a science element, and the lace tooling tells you that this isn’t just something for boys that’s been colored pink.