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Jason Lichtman

Professional product design and development consultant with a specialty in plastic consumer products, especially for injection molding.

All articles from the author

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An Introduction to Surface Modeling in Solidworks

So, you’ve been designing “things” using Solidworks for a while now. Maybe you took a Solidworks class or two, maybe you didn’t. Either way, you got to the point where you want to design more complicated & organic shapes and you are struggling. After all, designing organic shapes typically requires surface modeling in Solidworks, which […]

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Solidworks Tips and Tricks: Customized Toolbar and Splines

More than 3.2 million product designers and engineers use SOLIDWORKS worldwide. Fun fact: SOLIDWORKS crashed on me during a final exam once and my professor was not sympathetic — instead he decided to teach me a lesson in saving files more frequently. That lesson still haunts me over a decade later. Pro-tip: Always follow SOLIDWORKS […]

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Breaking Down the Walls of Product Design with Concurrent Engineering

Have you ever wondered how many people it took to bring that shiny new product you purchased from an idea to the actual object in your hands? It likely took the team effort of many more people than you might have imagined. Industrial design, mechanical engineering, manufacturing engineering, graphic design, packaging design, and more all […]

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Helpful Design Constraints vs. Over-Constraint: How to Find the Sweet Spot

If you design products, whether you’re a full time in-house engineer, a professional freelance industrial designer, or a moonlighting inventor, you’ve likely come across situations in which there is no solution to the design problem you have come across. I’m not referring to a scenario in which you cannot come up with a solution; I’m […]

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8 Tips to Maximize the Impact of Your Prototypes

You just finished the initial design of your product, and it looks great! Well, it looks great on your computer screen. So, you decide to make a prototype and see if your design looks and works as intended in real life. Odds are that the first prototype won’t meet all of your expectations. In fact, […]

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The High Cost of Late-Stage Design Changes

If you work professionally in product development, or even if you tinker in your free time, you already know that a single misstep can be the difference between releasing your product on time or being late to market. Sometimes, that’s the difference between success and failure in hardware design. It’s for this very reason that […]