Roger Sweet, Institute of Design Alum and Creator of He-Man, Dies at 91

Roger Sweet, an Institute of Design at Illinois Tech alum and the toy designer behind one of the most iconic characters in popular culture, died on April 28, 2026. He was 91 and had been battling dementia, The New York Times reports.

Sweet earned his MS from the Institute of Design in 1960—winning the American Society of Industrial Design student award while here, an honor that helped him land positions at three top design firms. His early career spanned general consumer design, with work for Rubbermaid, Hoover, Boeing, and Lockheed, and packaging for Procter & Gamble’s Downy and Scope lines. In 1975, Fortune named the Scope design one of the 50 best packages of the twentieth century.

Sweet’s arrival at Mattel was almost accidental; he signed on as a temporary employee and stayed because his diverse skill set—engineering experience included—proved too valuable to lose. Working in an era when design was just beginning to reshape how companies approached product development, Sweet brought both imagination and systems-level thinking to his craft. When Mattel missed the opportunity to produce the Star Wars toy line in the late 1970s, Sweet was among the designers tasked with building a new action figure concept from scratch—a challenge that would ultimately produce He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, one of the bestselling toy franchises in history.

The character’s origins were personal. Sweet described himself as physically capable but always slight. He-Man, with his exaggerated 2-to-1 body proportion and swiveling, spring-powered waist, “was the guy I could never be,” Sweet said.

But Sweet did think of himself as a lucky man, according to HeraldNet.com.

His approach reflected a trained designer’s aptitude for flexibility and narrative possibility. Rather than fixing his character to a single story world, he conceived of He-Man as a figure open enough to inhabit any setting—fantasy, science fiction, or otherwise—while remaining visually arresting and immediately recognizable. It is the kind of thinking that ID has cultivated in its graduates for decades: the ability to see past the immediate brief and design for enduring relevance.

The result was a character whose appeal has proven both durable and expansive. Through 1987 alone, Masters of the Universe toys earned Mattel and other companies more than $2 billion, with more than 55 million figures sold. He-Man anchored a toy line, an animated series, a feature film, and a franchise now approaching its fifth decade, with a new live-action film, Masters of the Universe, set for release in June 2026. Sweet wrote about the franchise’s rise and fall in his memoir, Mastering the Universe: He-Man and the Rise and Fall of a Billion-Dollar Idea.

Sweet reserved his greatest pride not for He-Man but for the work that changed daily life more quietly—the Boeing 747 interior, the Scope bottle, the Downy package. “To my way of thinking, that’s what it means to have an impact,” he said. “That stuff changed the world.”

Sweet’s story is a reminder that design education shapes culture in ways that outlast any single product. Among the many notable Institute of Design alumni who have left their mark across industries—from business and technology to healthcare and the arts—Sweet’s contribution may be the one most likely to be found in an attic, a collector’s case, or a child’s hands right now.

Sweet is survived by his wife, Marlene.