Eye Magazine

This is not a book about designing for children, nor is it aimed at children. Rather it aims to ‘connect to the kid within us’. The work is generally infantile rather than insightful, and full of play-acting rather than playfulness. Much of the aesthetic is dictated by the bezier curve tool in Adobe Illustrator, just as much of the content is dictated by 1980s popular culture. Design for Kids comes in a thick rubber dust jacket, baby blue, and the last 200 pages are die-cut in order to secrete a water pistol. It is interesting that the best pieces of work are some genuine children’s drawings, made in 1983 by the eleven-year-old Ryan McGinness.