Alumni Profile: Peggy Brown ’88

BFA in 1988, Industrial Design
Game Designer, peggybrown.net

Peggy Brown is full of it. Creativity, that is. She’s been overflowing with ideas all of her life. Her passion for playful silliness combined with her artistic perspective, natural curiosity, wealth of quirky knowledge, delight in pop-culture, and desire to share ideas with as many people as possible make a rare and winning combination. She’s certainly got that left brain-right brain combo thing happening, and she puts it to good use.

She’s created hundreds of products that have been mass-produced and marketed all over the world, written a couple of books, taught a few classes, and instigated countless people to chuck their inhibitions and unleash their creative spirits in a great variety of situations.

Backed by a Fine Arts degree in Industrial Design and an impressive resume, Peggy has worked for many of the world’s biggest toy companies in a number of capacities: as an inventor, a designer, writer, creative director, consultant, or executive. She has done development work on all kinds of products, including some with brands such as Barbie, Warner Brothers, Disney, Sesame Street, McDonald’s and Nickelodeon, just to name a few. She’s worked inside companies as a creative director and VP, and on her own as a product developer, creative thinker, designer, brainstorming leader, creative writer and author.

“As I recall there was a divide – there were Fine artists and designers. I think everybody is an artist. If you think about the ways you can apply fine art techniques to design and vice-versa, you really come up with some interesting stuff. I work on all different kinds of aspects of games and it’s all design work, because it’s problem-solving, and it’s all just pieces of this puzzle that creates a product. I like designing things that are intangible like the way that people interact with one another. It’s funny that these different things that I’m interested in have sort of been able to be melded into this career.”