The faces behind the fantasy

As an educator and industrial concept designer, Robertson's personal work has run the gamut. Over the years he's designed bicycles, helmets, wheelchairs and has had many major toy, automotive, film and video game companies as clients -- Mattel, Fiat, Universal Studios, Sony Online Entertainment among them. Though he's found the jobs consistently challenging and never wants for work, a few years back he felt that there was something eluding him.

"After about 10 years into it, I got to a point where it was all about the work," he explains. "Not that the work isn't the most amazing thing. You're doing stuff for movies and toys, fun industrial design projects, but the jobs sort of all become the same from a process standpoint. The fun, from the art perspective, was gone."

Teaching the craft at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and running his own design studio, Robertson had found he often had little time to maintain the friendships he had made in art school -- the very thing that had been an essential part of the "fun": the interplay with other artists. That all hit home when his father, Richard, a fine artist, died in 2001. Robertson was struck by the large community of artists -- 150 by his casual tally -- who traveled to pay their last respects. Something clicked: "They were friends who used to get together and talk and paint, but it had nothing to do with commerce. And so I was pretty moved by the outpouring," he says.

Robertson assembled seven of his friends -- "film guys and industrial designers" who, like himself, had so immersed themselves in their work-for-hire that they had little or nothing to show of their personal work. The idea was to have informal critiques / get-togethers.

After a year of these sessions, Robertson, impressed with the quality of the work, hit on an idea to not only publish the work in book form but to form a sort of profit-sharing publishing collective -- with the press funding the project and each artist-author receiving a percentage depending on how much money he or she put up.

A crash course in book publishing and DSP was born. The first volume, "Concept Design: 1," published in 2002, featured the seven artists who were part of Robertson's original weekend collective and illustrated the craft from various perspectives -- a vivid world of digital plein-air painting, altered landscapes, "propulsion units," airships and other "quirky" vehicles.