Here are the highlights of my full-stack design responsibilities doing arts & crafts activity kits for kids during my time at ArtSkills, Inc. My work ranged from carrying out projects independently start-to-finish, to working under senior designers, to leading small teams of associate designers, to contributing instructional and component materials to kits lead by other team members. I dabbled in most everything, and appreciate that immensely.
Disclaimer: All packaging and logo designs, artwork, and promotional imagery and video are © 2024 ArtSkills, Inc. All rights reserved.
Videos are for demonstrating the purpose and content of the kits, I do not claim creation of them.
Please do not save, share, or redistribute this artwork.
Epic Lab Science Kits™
I lead the product development on three Epic Lab Science Kits™ line. Following a creative brief and working with the creative director and marketing team, I researched, devised, and tested the guided experiments, designed supplemental materials including posters, and determined product specs for component pieces. Crucially, these projects necessitated clear, concise 16-20 page instructional booklets that were accessible as well as engaging to a younger audience (8+), providing well-researched STEM concepts that tied in directly with the activities, which I wrote all the copy for.
Epic Lab Jr. Science Kits™ Space Discovery
This item was the maiden voyage of the Epic Lab Jr. line, a younger sibling to the Epic Lab collection of STEM kits, which I worked on near-independently. The goal was to get young kids (6+) excited about learning space facts that tied into heavily tactile activities, rather than guided experiments as in Epic Lab. An adorably playful illustration style, combined with spearheading the branding of the new line, made this an out-of-this-world project to work on!
Front of package. I designed the logo, layout and did all the illustrations, and worked with our in-house crafter and 3D designer to develop the moon rock, planet tray, and shuttle base.
Back of package. I researched and wrote all the copy on the informational poster, which could the display the finished activities.
Promotional imagery showcasing the three completed activities, including informational dig mat, which provided historical context to the mystery toys in the moon rock.
Promotional image highlighting the steps to build the Space Shuttle.
Build & Bash™
Build & Bash™ aimed to be a one-of-a-kind, highly interactive board game, based around constructing and demolishing castles made of sculpting sand combined with Capture the Flag. I worked extensively with the senior designer to develop the rules and play-test the game under a rigorous timeline. I made major design contributions to the logo and supplemental illustrations, and designed the board layout, action cards, and back-of-package.
Clay in Motion Instruction Booklet
I came onto this project reasonably far into development and creating the instruction booklet was one of the final steps in taking it over the finish line. My teammate had designed sculpted the characters based on the motor shapes; it was my responsibility to reverse-engineer the steps to get to the final designs and communicate the sculpting techniques needed.
The clay guides were true-to-size, so they could easily be used as accurate templates for kid 6+.
I greatly enjoyed organizing this side of the sheet and vectorizing the characters to break them down into their component parts. I also had a penchant for naming characters within projects I worked on, so it was fun to see them officially in production!
(I especially like Sweet Pea because he looks like one of those frozen bags of corn-carrot-pea vegetable medley.)
Coloring Book Activity Kits
This project was an excellent foray into project management, especially when it came to leading the associate designers tasked alongside me with creating 192 pages of coloring page content for Walmart, 16 pages across 12 books, each with different themes and specialty features in an accelerated timeline. It required multiple iterations of feedback and ideation to land on the subject matter, gather the imagery, and properly layout the booklets. 6 of the booklets were color-by-number as well, which required intense attention to detail across the volume of content. And then, every image needed to be colored according to the markers in the kit for the packaging and promotional material.
The categories (scented markers, glow in the dark, fuzzy art, and glitter) each required different supplemental materials, including scented sticker sheets, glow-in-the-dark pen, and gem sheets. It was an exercise in flexibility, and required constant communication with our overseas sourcing team to ensure our pages matched the materials we could source.
As a baseline there were 192 pages — but our team powered through that number many times over.
I illustrated the ice cream and cupcake kitties!
Color-Your-Own Kits
I collaborated with the senior designer on these projects, with my focus being the vector illustrations and instruction sheets for the cardboard structures. I also had a splendid time “coloring in” the finished products!