The Full Circle of Inspiration

A 1/72 Scale US Air Force C-27J, early in construction

My 20 plus yeas of model building have given me the tools I needed to be a UX designer. From an obsession with Scale to my attention to detail. I can give my hobbies credit with teaching me a lot of what I now use on a daily basis. From that, I was able to turn my passion for UX design into a way to help my fellow hobbyists. 

Ever since I was little, I have always had a fascination with scale, and comparing the sizes of different things. I would always organize my toys by size, and complain to myself when things weren’t made to scale with each other. When i got older, i discovered model building. I did my research, and picked a scale that I knew had the largest variety of subjects, from the very tiny, to very huge, but all the same scale. This was like a  dream come true for me. At the time, most of the models I was building were aircraft. I chose aircraft because thats what I grew up with. My mother was a flight attendant, and I spent a lot of my early years in and around airplanes. 

I built everything I could, from the tiniest Utility aircraft, to the largest bombers, all the same scale, so that I could see the differences in the evolution of different lines of aircraft over time. Model building was key to teaching me how to really pay close attention to details. This attention to detail would get more more interesting and accurate models. 

UX is no different. Whether is painstakingly painting the minuscule seatbelt buckles on a 1/72 scale P-51 Mustang, or kerning the text on a webpage to make it just perfect. Details are everything. 

To come full circle, it’s my love of User centered design that triggered me to come up with Out of the Box. As a model builder, I always struggled with not being able to find modern or accurate kits of some of the aircraft that I was interested in. Mainly this was because they were obscure, and would not make financial sense for manufacturer to shell out tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to make a mold and start a production run.  I wracked my brain for months trying to figure out how so to solve that issue. There was the age old solution of scratch building. While I was capable of doing that, I knew that I didn’t have the patience for that.  That’s when i discovered 3D printing. It was exactly what I was looking for.

Now that I knew how to make the models, I needed to find a way to get them designed, inexpensively, since I knew that most other hobbyists didn’t have much money work with. I did some searching and found a freelancing site that had some decent talent. Then, after years of trial and error, I finally found my core team of engineers. They were talented, responsive, and best of all, they were reasonably priced. 

Now, I was in a position to offer my customers the chance to have the model they always wanted. Now, they have the control pay a reasonable fee, and get a model of any subject they want. 

It wasn’t until very recently that we saw potential in a b2b market, where we could provide nightly accurate, and highly detailed museum quality display models for other businesses. We are currently working on breaking into that business as well.

The Finished C-27J Spartan, of the United States Air Force, Ohio Air National Guard.