Kiwico | Sayee Ambekar

Graphic Design for Kids

Designing for kids

At Kiwico, I was a part of the team that creates STEAM toys for kids aged 3-6 years. Each game was meticulously designed to boost the child’s fine and gross motor skills, problem solving skills, critical thinking skills along with soft skills like group play and creative exploration. My responsibilities as the graphic designer on the team were to design the activity instruction booklets, art directing photoshoots for the booklet covers, collaborating with illustrators to come up with ideas for the kit toppers and story books.

Activity Instruction Booklets

The biggest challenge to design for 3-year-olds was to oversimplify steps and instructions that seem obvious to us. What helped decide the user journey for these booklets was building the activity from start to end and noting problem areas before starting the booklet design. Once I had laid out the steps for each activity, I gave photo examples to the illustrators as instructions to draw each step in a way that would be easy for a 3-year-old to understand. After the booklets were at a good stage, we then did kid testings as a team where we gave the activity and the booklets to a kid and observed how they would play the game without any intervention. I took notes where the kid was stuck or had trouble understanding the instructions and made modifications in later versions.

Crate Toppers

In each Kiwico kit, the toys are placed under a crate topper on top of which booklets sit nicely held in place together with neat tabs. The toppers are the first thing a kid sees when they open up their box. It sets a tone of what the theme of the crate is and what activities lay underneath. The topper in itself is sometimes a small easter egg moment where there are tiny puzzles, mazes, and fun facts and always features the beloved mascot “Steve” which is always a delight to the kids.

Art Directing

To show the entire activity on the cover page of each booklet, I usually took test shots of the each game in multiple angles and combinations and positioned it inside the cover templates often adding some quirky lines for a wow element. Once these were approved by the entire team, a professional photographer replicated these shots in studio lighting.