The idea for Boomi spawned from a picture of a boom box that I saw on Flickr. The boom box kind of reminded me of a robot head, so I started doodling on my notepad. After a few sketches, I decided to use him for a music video project that I had to do for Audio/Video class back in 2007. His debut was in the following music video (WARNING: my animation skills are laughable).

I was pretty satisfied with the music video, but I felt that I could further develop Boomi as a character. In summer 2008, I decided to make Boomi into a physical product, with the magic of papercraft. I felt that papercraft was the perfect medium to turn Boomi into a physical product because A) Boomi has a very 'boxy' shape, which is ideal for papercraft, and B) papercraft is cheap. Another reason why I wanted to make Boomi into a physical was that I wanted to create my own 'designer toy' - kind of like a poor man's Munny doll ;)

I started off by drawing many sketches of what the new-and-improved Boomi might look like. I drew many different versions of Boomi in different angles and shapes, keeping in mind that I have to make him simple to make with paper. Unfortunately I seem to have lost almost all of my sketches - the scan above is one of the few I could find.

I then created blueprints for Boomi and started to build some prototype models. I experimented with different sizes, shapes, and proportions, until I was 100% satisfied. I used scrap paper for all prototypes in order to minimize the waste of paper. The trickiest part was coming up with a way to make the head. I learned that it's not very easy to create a box with paper, because the paper is usually too flimsy to close off the final edge (I'm sorry, it's a little difficult to explain in words, but it's actually pretty tricky building a box out of thin paper).

Shown above are pictures of the version 1.0 release of Boomi. Although I am very satisfied with the look-and-feel of Boomi, I feel that I can still improve on the blueprint, and make him easier to build. In the upcoming weeks, I plan on creating improved and simpler blueprints for Boomi.

Please click here to download the blueprints for Boomi v.1.0. Boomi currently comes in 4 flavours: Yellow, Mocha, Pink, and Blank.