August 25, 2014: Designing The Munchkin Messenger Bag

Having never designed a bag before, I thought you might like to see some of the iterative process I went through to take the Munchkin Messenger Bag from "cool idea" (see "Where Did The Munchkin Messenger Bag Come From?" for that story) to "actual product." My first sketches helped determine the size of the bag and how much Munchkin goodness we could stuff inside it:

Once I settled on the components that the bag needed to hold, I made a new sketch and mockup image to send to our manufacturer:

I also came up with two designs for the zipper pulls, and we decided on the rubberized version for the final bag:

After seeing the first tooling sample of the bag, I added a few more design tweaks, including the screen-printed logo, collapsible dividers (in case you wanted to use the bag for other purposes), and the hidden zipper pouch in the top flap. I sent the manufacturer one more Photoshop mockup:

I'm incredibly proud of the final product, and I know Munchkin fans will enjoy it! Plus, it includes four new Munchkin cards and a unique jumbo D6!

-- Samuel Mitschke