This week's Designer Spotlight focuses on Tom van der Zanden, a talented inventor who turns his mind to making crazy puzzles. The twist in this tale is that his passion lies in creating the puzzles, but he leaves the solving of them up to you! 

I am Tom van der Zanden, 19 years old. I am currently studying Computer Science and Mathematics at Utrecht University. I am starting the last year of my bachelor's degree now and next year I will start on my master's. I live in the city of Nieuwegein, The Netherlands, which is close to the University and only 70km from the Shapeways office! Besides creating puzzles, I also like to play piano and saxophone.

I have always been fascinated by how things work and DIY. My interest in puzzles started when my friend introduced me to the Rubik's Cube. I was into competitive solving for a while but I never got far. On the internet I noticed people building their own puzzles which had a strong appeal to me. I really got inspired to build my own puzzles by the work of Adam Cowan and Andrew Cormier, who both helped me a great deal with learning 3D design.

How did you learn how to design in 3D? What brought you to 3D printing with Shapeways?

My design skills are pretty much self-taught, with help from other puzzle makers. I started out working with AutoCAD but I moved to SolidWorks as this software is better suited to my work and better fits with the way I think. My first designs were printed for me by a friend who has access to a FDM printer at the school where he works. Unfortunately his access to the printer is limited so I could not produce many puzzles using this technique. It was Oskar van Deventer who pointed me to Shapeways and I opened my shop in August of 2009. WSF is actually a far nicer material than the FDM material and gradually I got more comfortable using it. Helped by income from my shop I've been able to make many new puzzles.

Putting the puzzles together is relatively easy. From the design process I have a clear idea of where each piece goes and once you actually have the pieces in hand it is usually easy to figure out how to put them together. The hardest part is always getting the last few pieces in place but thanks to the amazing flexibility and resilience of WSF it is possible to snap them in place. I can not solve all of my puzzles, though I can solve some of them - but I rarely do so. The part about puzzles I enjoy most is actually designing them and figuring out a working mechanism for complex puzzles, rather than solving them. I leave that to my collectors!

Check out this video of the Multidodecahedron puzzle in action. It has an internal and external puzzle in one -  unbelievable!

I have attended two "puzzle parties" where I met far too many amazing puzzle makers to list them all.  Andrew Cormier and Adam Cowan are both amazing puzzle makers and do have shops on Shapeways. I already mentioned him, but Oskar van Deventer is an amazing puzzle maker who has been churning out new puzzles like crazy on Shapeways. He encouraged me to start my own shop which really changed a lot for me, because it generated money that I could put towards making new puzzles. Using income from Shapeways I can sustain my puzzle making hobby, which is great as it is quite rare for puzzle making (or any other hobby) to be self-sustainable like this!

In my puzzle making I am not so much limited by what shapes the printing technology can make but by fundamental mechanical properties. It's unreasonable to ask for a material that is unbreakable even when 0.1mm thin even though such a material would be very nice. Not directly applicable to puzzles, I find the idea of printing circuitry and microchips very attractive. I would love to see computing devices roll out of printers sometime in the future.

Have your mind twisted at Tom's Shapeways shop or check out his website. You can also dive into the vibrant community of puzzlers on Twisty Puzzles or check out other puzzles on Shapeways.

This weeks Designer Spotlight focuses on Pete, Daniel, Carl and Rob, a group of four rambling drinkers living in New York City. They make up Gotham Smith, a line of accessories for the fashionable gent.

What's the story behind your designs?

We had long gathered in lower Manhattan for drinks and lively conversation. We found that we shared not only an appreciation of the care that goes into a well mixed cocktail, but we also shared values on what accessories befit a man and tended to complement one another accordingly. Over the course of a year, our conversations flowed into sketches, sketches flowed into models, models flowed into final products, and products flowed into the company that you see today.

After some attempts to build products out of stamped metal and wood, we quickly realized all of the difficulties involved. We had known about Shapeways and 3D printing, but we had never tried it out. We decided to print up some cufflinks for a friend's wedding and immediately loved the instant feedback of 3D printing via Shapeways.

We are fortunate enough to have a resident mad scientist industrial designer in our midst. He actually cut his teeth with SolidWorks through a previous job building a vegetable-based lard factory. He handles the first pass at the 3D model and then we print, discuss, modify and repeat until we feel we have something ready to launch. 

There are a variety of ways that we promote our work. We try to have a strong presence through various digital platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. We do have our own website along with our Shapeways shop to provide even more of the story behind our designs. Probably the biggest thing is that we were written up by many blogs right at launch which gave us a great boost in awareness.

Every designer should constantly be looking at various ways to reach their audience. There are so many platforms out there and you never know which one will be best for your audience until you experiment with many.

The cluster of current fascinations change every few weeks. We love so much obscure stuff that we actually keep a secret tumblr to pass references back and forth amongst the group. In the Shapeways community, Theo Jansen's Animaris Geneticus Parvus is our favorite: it's complex, impossible to understand, and totally awesome to watch crawl around.  We also love the Bugaboo Locking Pin by the Bugaboo Repair Guy. Because it's a real solution to a real problem of modern products made with 3D printing. Simple, elegant, and the kind of thing we can get behind.

We are very interested in adaptive modeling. Perhaps a model changes according to when a customer ordered it or by the number of vowels in their name. Being able to tweak very fine details on a by order basis to give our consumers an even deeper story about their product would be amazing.

The world of 3D printing is so exciting right now. We encourage everyone to talk to as many people as possible, partner with as many people as possible, and be as open as possible so that we can really make sure 3D printing changes the world!

We love to hear that! Check out Gotham Smith's quirky designs on their Shapeways shop or their website.

This weeks Designer Spotlight focuses on Josh Korda, who uses his buddhist practice to inspire his jewelry making. 

I'm Josh Korda, I teach buddhist practice at a few locations in New York City, and have been a freelance art director (web only now) for many, many years. About 6 months ago I taught myself Rhino and then started creating my own 3D designs.

My designs have two primary inspirations: 

1) My buddhist practice (I've been practicing for a very long time). I make rings and pendants conveying some of the core spiritual principles that help me stay calm amidst the challenges of daily life: kindness, meditation, body and breath relaxation, community, reflections on impermanence and so forth.

2) A lot of the rings and bracelets are inspired by the Space Age Designs of the 1960s; futuristic images were in vogue when I was growing up, from TV shows like the Jetsons, sci-fi book covers even the furniture designs of Saarinen. I make a bunch of fun pieces that try to capture the spirit of retro-future.

I was looking for a way to actualize the work I was designing in Rhino that was both affordable and wearable and a  presentable quality. Shapeways was the ideal solution.

How did you learn how to design in 3D?My wife Kathy is an amazing and successful jewelry designer, she's freelanced for virtually every major brand over the years, who uses Rhino and I grew interested in the possibilities of 3D product design. Kathy has a buddhist inspired jewelry brand, MettaMetalworks, and she allows me to contribute and gives me terrific creative feedback.

At this point, as I'm so early in the process of creating jewelry, I'm not actively engaged in promoting the work beyond simply showing some of the pieces, as they arrive from Shapeways, on Facebook. The feedback has been wonderful and people asked if they could buy pieces, so I started my Shapeways shop to make them available.

Who are your favorite designers or artists?

In terms of great jewelry designers, Arman Sarkisyan and Philip Crangi jump immediately to mind. They're amazing, and of course, my wife Kathy's work. There are quite a number of wonderful, inspiring artists who use Shapeways too, Nervous System being my favorites; while their work stays firmly within a set paradigm, what they do they do brilliantly. I've also seen some pieces by Dario Scapitta that are very well considered. I've stumbled upon some designs by GemsBridalJewelry that demonstrate so much 3D skill - they're quite motivating! 

I don't feel limited by the technology at present. I look forward to the print resolution of the stainless and bronze pieces improve a little and I'm really happy with the results of polished sterling silver! 

May all beings be peaceful and find lasting happiness!

Check out Josh's beautiful work at his Shapeways Shop Josh Korda Ornaments, and for further inspiration on Bhuddist teachings you can check out his podcasts on Dharmapunkx or his video talks. 

This weeks Designer Spotlight focuses on Alex Delderfield, creator of Delta Edge, a shop specializing in Minecraft figurines. Here he shares his story of how to build a successful shop and internet following. Read on for some great tips for shop owners!

My name is Alex Delderfield (I go by the online persona 'AD-Edge'), I'm from South Australia, 23 years old and currently studying a Bachelor of Computer Science at Adelaide University.

Working with Shapeways and 3D printed objects was a natural progression for me, I'd been prominently working in 3D (for the most part with Blender) since high school. I first heard of Shapeways (and 3D printing) during my 2 years writing articles on Blendernation for Bart Veldhuizen (one of the community managers at Shapeways). Bart would write up the occasional news article about an object made in Blender which had printed via Shapeways.

After hearing about 3D printing, in particular how easy and accessible it was with Shapeways, I joined up on the forums and started browsing around occasionally looking at the things people were creating.

At the start of 2011 I decided I couldn't wait any longer and produced my first 3D print. It was a 3D figurine of a character (Mew) from the well known Pokemon series I watched as a child. 

Fast forward to the end of that year and I'd started to come up with some ideas that people would potentially really like. The final push for me, after I had some ideas forming, was when the full colour sandstone material was released and I could see the quality. It was the material I was most interested in because it printed in full colour, meaning I wouldn't have to paint a hundred models by hand.  I started to get serious about my main Minecraft idea and started working on some new objects to print.

Since I started with a figurine, most of my initial ideas continued down that path. I wanted to do something a large amount of people would recognize and say "I want that!". So I focused on trying to find something which I would really want, which didn't yet exist (not easy!). I was heavily into Minecraft at the time (and still am) and really appreciated the minimalistic retro graphics, not to mention one of the most infamous gaming bad guys of all time - the Creeper, which was gaining a reputation almost as quickly as the game itself. I was also seeing some other Minecraft 3D printing starting up, but no one had printed the popular animals/mobs from the game at that stage.

The Creeper model turned out to be the first model I had ready to print (early Jan 2012) - modelling the creeper, getting the textures working right, making it hollow and working out the whole process to get the model from Blender onto the Shapeways website ready to print, took several months of work.

After the Creeper was ready, I whipped up a couple of other figurines to also include in the order. I'll be honest, at this point I was nervous about how they would turn out. Either way, the day came when the models arrived, the first thing I thought when I pulled the Creeper figurine out of its tomb of bubble wrap was "This is amazing!".  The quality and look of the model far exceeded anything I was expecting, and I knew I had to buckle down and finish the idea.

So from then onwards I was set on the plan and started getting more efficient at producing print-ready models, at one point I made 8 in one day, which was a bit of an improvement on the 3 months it took to get the Creeper figurine done!

Mostly self taught, but I have to credit a lot of it to the community which surrounds Blender. Without the community there wouldn't be the amount of support, documentation and tutorials there are these days. Especially now with the more serious sites that have popped up, focusing on providing high quality tutorials. So when 3D printing came along I was pretty much setup to get right into it.

This is where I probably spent the most time planning and working. I had a very strict plan to follow right from the start, with several phases and milestones to complete to make sure I was on track. The main thing was that I didn't want was to just dump some models in my Shapeways store to see how they went. I wanted prototypes of the models printed, pictures for galleries ready, videos, various other networking and popular sites covered and a website all ready for the first day of my designs going 'public' to the world. Ed note: This is a great approach, as then the first time people see your work they are blown away by a finished product, not just a work in progress.

The video advertisements for Youtube were probably the more interesting part to work on. Even before working on them I worked on a more 'viral' based Minecraft video with lots of flares, slow motion, and papercraft figurines going up in great big explosions (no Shapeways prints were harmed here! I promise). 

This video started getting thousands of views, and was uploaded well before I had the videos complete for the 3D printed figurines. It helped me establish a 'presence' in the Minecraft community before the figurines went public, so I felt like that was a good way to start. It also meant that as soon as my shop and advertisement videos went live, I could just add links right to the start of this already popular video which is currently getting about 6k views a day alone.

I put together a quick little website to act as the central host for all the information and I also set up Twitter and Facebook pages, which are starting to gain momentum. I wanted to have them setup from day one as well and I plan to host give-aways and contests later on when there are more followers to interact with.

One of the trickiest things about posting something on Reddit is posting at the right time to get a lot of exposure, choosing when something's likely to be popular (25% guess work, 75% luck!).  I'd been browsing the /r/gaming subreddit for a few days prior and had seen several 3D printing related posts (mainly 3D printed characters from games) becoming very popular.

Originally I posted my album as a reply comment in one of these other topics. Within a few hours I had 2,500+ views and a bunch of comments, all of this when I posted in someone else's topic. It was at that stage I thought I'd throw the album up in its own topic to see what happened.

The response was crazy, the topic rocketed to the front page of the gaming subreddit within a few hours. When I went to bed that night the album had 80,000 views, I woke up the next day and refreshed the page - 500,000 views and a ton of comments. By the end of that day (48 hours since the album was initially posted) it had flown past 1,100,000 views. Later on it would reach almost 1.5 million.

I'd been following the Minecraft Monday show since earlier this year, I think I actually found it when I was scoping out places where I could potentially show these figurines off. I even submitted the 'viral' Minecraft video Id made, which really helped it get up and running on Youtube. I've kept in contact with Keith, the guy who runs the show, ever since. He is really supporting of the entire Minecraft community. 

I recently shipped a bunch of figurines his way, to be given away on the show. They haven't yet appeared on the show, but I'm hoping they will arrive in time to be show on the upcoming Minecraft Monday show in a day or two.

Shop traffic was 10-12 times more than normal over the weekend they were on reddit.

The website got, in 2 days, more than the previous months total views.

Sales over that weekend were also impressive, and for the week following I've been having sales every day.

Its business as usual at my end, I get the usual emails notifying me that there has been a sale, general questions for customers or notifications when a model has been produced and shipped, but as far as the logistics go its been pretty much the same for me, with Shapeways producing and shipping my orders! There was a lot of emails, PM's and comments/questions on Reddit back when it was super popular, so that did take quite some time to manage, but it was great hearing what people had to say about the figurines, and all the enthusiasm was quite motivating.

It's nice to see the rewards of careful planning and hard work pay of! Check out Alex's Shapeways shop here. Love Minecraft? Check out some Mineways and some other Minecraft inspired shops on Shapeways too! Happy designing...