Kid-Tested, Designer-Dad Approved

Through the creative play introduced to 7-year-old Ben, the father-son duo have made the Lunch Posts a treasured part of their routine. Post-It illustration above shows how the budding creative Ben Kimmel finishes the drawing and sentence started by his designer dad Rob Kimmel. www.wandermonster.com

1. Lunch Posts
Of course, one of the downsides to enjoying  your children’s company to this extent is that eventually they go to school. Some parents reach this point earlier, with daycare, nannies or grandparents entering the scene. Others have to suffer the separation at the elementary school door. Either way, there’s this long stretch of time when we are cut off from our kids, large parts of their lives that we have no access to. The urge to call or text them creeps up, irrationally, in the middle of the day.

My solution came disguised as a way to teach my son letters and numbers. As explained earlier, I pack his lunch with a Post-It note stuck to the inside lid of  his lunch box, each with half of a drawing and a simple spelling or number puzzle. The picture would be, say, three flying saucers, along with a line where’d he fill in the number ì3,î or a picture of a lion and the letters “L I _ N” for him to fill in the “O.” The rest of the image was up to him to complete.

He loved it, and the little piece of colored paper bearing a half-completed drawing and a half-written story has become a treasured part of our daily routine. I anxiously await picking him up after school to see how he finishes these miniature comics. It’s a great way for us to feel connected, and it has proven to be rich fertilizer for his imagination.
Though there’s no sense of competition, we do enjoy surprising each other with the constant stream of invention. Over time, his drawings and writing have become increasingly sophisticated. I started to post the results on our blog, WanderMonster.com. I see it as a shared art project, but he sees it as a fun activity.

2. Treasure Map
This is a game that needs two adults, but not at the same time. Two teams, each with a kid and an adult, is even better. I’m the son of a geographer and am married to a travel junkie, so I’ve been eager to get my son comfortable with using maps. This game is a superb way to equip a kid with a sense of power over maps, which can be intimidating.

First, you need to prepare a piece of paper. We go a little overboard, choosing a high-rag sheet, soaking it in tea, crumpling it and abusing it with dirt, coffee and rust, even burning the edges to give it a pirate-y feel. This part isn’t necessary, but it’s a fun way to make a creative mess, and you can make enough in one session to last for many adventures. Then, page in hand, one adult takes the kid to a park or other outdoor space, mapping a path through the environment, finding features that stand out, made as fantastical as possible, though still recognizable. Fallen trees can be sleeping giants; mud puddles are pools of lava; jungle gyms appear as ruined castles. The kid draws pictures and labels them, placing them in a sequence roughly equivalent to their real positions. A “treasure” is hidden at the final location, and the second adult (or team) follows the map to find it. You can do this at large indoor spaces, like churches or schools, too.

MORE RESOURCES FOR GRAPHIC DESIGNERS

• Engage creative kids in design and the creative process. Check out “Design Dossier: Graphic Design.”
• Check out the “Written on the City” and explore the beautiful side of graffiti.
• The Accidental Creative DesignCast series unlocks keys for being creative under pressure. Find out more.