Wobble

A category designed for the wrong person

A new range of chunky crayons, fat markers and poster paint for children under seven. The products were built properly for small hands. The category they were entering was not: it is designed almost entirely to reassure the adult holding the basket, with tidy layouts, tasteful muted palettes, and photographs of immaculate children producing immaculate pictures.

The tasteful Scandinavian kids' brand

Dusty sage, soft terracotta, a thin geometric sans, and a wooden toy shot on linen. It is beautiful and it is aimed squarely at a parent's living room. The child, who is the actual user and cannot read, is given nothing to grab hold of.

The wordmark is drawn wrong on purpose

Every letter is slightly uneven, differently weighted, and tilted a degree or two off. It is the single decision the whole brand rests on. A child recognises it as their own handwriting rather than an adult's, and a competitor cannot copy it without looking like a mistake, because to anyone outside the brand it is one.

A blob that squashes, stretches and splits

The character is a shape rather than a creature: no species, no gender, no name, two dots and a smile. That was deliberate, because a shape can squash, stretch, split in two and change colour without ever being off-model, and a child can draw it themselves in one stroke. Most kids' mascots cannot survive being redrawn by a four-year-old. This one is improved by it.

Primary, because that is what they reach for

Four saturated primaries and white, chosen for recognition rather than taste. A child selects by colour long before they can read a product name, so the colour is the navigation. It also happens to be the loudest possible thing on a shelf full of sage and terracotta, which was a useful accident rather than the reason.

Designed to be reached for, not admired

Packs are sized and weighted for a child to pull off a low shelf without help, with the window low so the actual crayons are visible at a metre off the ground. The classroom system extends to wall vinyl and storage labels in the same four colours, so a room can be organised by colour before anyone in it can read.

Written the way a four year old actually talks, not the way an adult writes about one. Repetition, shouting, sound effects, and grammar that gives up halfway. It is allowed every single thing the rest of the portfolio bans, because a children's brand that cannot use an exclamation mark is not a children's brand.