Grimes was an industrial designer who worked for Philips for most of his career. He joined Timex in January 1983 as design manager, computer products. In December 1983, he resigned from Timex to return to Philips Design in Europe.
His designs included the Timex Sinclair 2068 computer, its cartridges, the 2050 modem, 1510 cartridge adapter, an unreleased numeric keypad that would have plugged into the cartridge slot and the TS 1500 (color and graphics).
He designed the lettering for the TS 2068 keycaps and overlay, intending it to be a guide for the keyboard manufacturer. Instead, it was used as the master image and a small flaw in the Letraset he used was preserved in the production keyboard.
He had little prior knowledge of the home computer industry. In working with the engineers and others at Timex, he’d receive a brief that described the general outline of the product and, based on that, he generated a series of design proposals. As you can see from the illustrations below, it was an evolving process. These sketches were a prerequisite to a final proposal that would have been presented to product management.
He designed a couple other products while at Timex: the Triathlon sports watch for the Digital Watch group and an early pregnancy test kit for the Health Check group. The Triathlon design set the form language for the Timex Ironman series that followed.
He has 14 US design patents in his name, 6 with Timex.
Gary Grimes earned his BFA degree in industrial design at The Cleveland Institute of Art in 1968 and was recruited directly out of college by General Motors Styling in Warren, Michigan. There, he was assigned to the commercial vehicle studio.
He left GM after two years and had a couple different design positions, one with Acton Bjorn International Design Consultant in Copenhagen, Denmark and another with General Electric Medical Systems Design Department in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
In 1974 he joined Philips Design in Eindhoven, Holland. At Philips he was assigned to the portable radio recorder group. He was a very successful designer; having many of his designs go into production each year.
While at Philips he had the opportunity to have expat assignments in Vienna, Austria and Singapore. He returned to the US in 1999 to work in the Philips Design office in Atlanta, Georgia.
Grimes retired in 2009. Now he spends his time mountain biking and playing table tennis at the Cobb County senior centers.
TS 2068 Design Drawings
