Big Marks. The review, then the redesign.
What is in the app today, how a real kid handles it, and one calm redesign direction built on the studio brand. Reviewed from the actual Swift source, not screenshots alone.
A finished little app, not a prototype
Nine screens, a real drawing engine (flood fill, stay-in-lines, undo, thumbnails), IAP with photo credits, a compliant no-keyboard parental gate, and a genuinely novel bedtime mode. It builds and runs on iPhone and iPad today.
29 pages · 3 packs
Dinosaurs 11, Trucks 9, Space 9. Plus Free Draw and unlimited Photo Magic pages.
Photo to colouring page
Tips, parental gate, capture, crop, ~10s xAI conversion via the proxy worker. Credits charged per success. Live and verified on device.
Unlock All + credit packs
StoreKit IAP, restore purchases, all behind the maths gate. An "Unlock All" gradient banner sits on the child's home screen.
Gate is genuinely good
Two-digit addition, four tap-to-answer chips, reshuffles on a wrong tap. No keyboard. Guards camera, library and purchases.
Real design system
BigMarksUI.swift: 64pt toddler targets, WCAG readable-ink helper, spacing and radius scales, confetti rewards. Better bones than most kids apps.
Red Light Mode
A true night palette for bedtime colouring. No competitor does this. It is buried in Settings behind a grown-up label.
Could a kid drive it alone?
Judged screen by screen against what a pre-reader can actually do: no reading, no typing, no system dialogs, thumbs on the edges of a landscape phone.
Onboarding wants typed text, categories are words, and a locked page or the banner drops them into a store screen.
Once onboarded, colouring is excellent: huge targets, instant fill, confetti. The bumps are all around the edges of the core loop.
Full app is usable including Photo Magic with a parent. Content depth becomes the limit, not usability.
The bumps, ranked
Onboarding asks the child to type
Step 2 is a name TextField on a landscape keyboard. The escape hatch ("Just start drawing") is a small underlined text link. Result on the test device: a child named "Hi". Fix: tap-only onboarding, name moves to the grown-ups area.
The store leaks into kid space
Tapping any locked page routes straight to the purchase screen, and the loudest element on home is an "Unlock All" gradient banner. The gate stops payment, not the dead end. Fix: one grown-ups door; locked cards wiggle and stay put.
Pre-readers cannot read the nav
Categories are words (DINOSAURS, TRUCKS, SPACE) with abstract 16pt icons, and the dinosaur icon is a leaf. Fix: big pictogram tiles: a dino means dinosaurs.
First save triggers an iOS permission dialog
Save writes to the Photos library, so the child's reward moment is a system alert they cannot read. Fix: save to the in-app gallery by default; Photos export lives with grown-ups.
Grown-up UI inside kid flows
The custom colour button opens the system ColorPicker (sliders, hex, opacity). Errors use system alerts titled "Photo Magic Error". Fix: curated big-swatch sheet; Marko delivers errors in kid words.
Small confusions
Eraser and undo sit near each other with similar glyphs and no redo. The camera launcher lives on the kid home header but dead-ends without credits. Sound feedback exists, haptics do not. Fix: separate undo visually, add redo, move camera entry into the grid as a card.
Toddler-safe targets
64pt minimum tap targets on iPad, 44pt enforced on the iPhone rails. Measured in code, not claimed.
Contrast that cannot break
readableInk() picks charcoal or white by WCAG luminance, so a child's chosen colour never hides a label.
Reward loop works
Confetti on save, gold stars on finished pages, a NEW sticker capped to one per pack so home never turns into sticker soup.
Good bones, noisy chrome
The palette is already calm: a Montessori set of dusty blue, leaf green, warm terracotta on cream. The noise comes from decoration stacked on decoration. One category chip today carries a fill, a coloured border, a white inner ring, a darker bottom edge, a drop shadow and a scale effect, all at once.
White strokes on everything retire
Buttons, swatches, avatars, badges and cards all wear 2 to 3px white outlines plus shadows. Nothing reads as more important than anything else.
Tilted stickers and gradients retire
The rotated NEW badge and the coral-to-orange banner are the two loudest objects in the app, and neither is the art.
Nav painted the loudest colour calm down
The iPad sidebar is a full slab of the child's colour. The child's colour should mark their things, not the furniture.
White art cards keep
Line art on clean white with no colour wash is the best call in the current design. It stays.
Edge Rails drawing layout keep
Tools and colours on the short edges where thumbs already are. Locked and signed off earlier; the redesign refines it rather than replacing it.
Marko keep
The mascot earns his place: greeter, error messenger and reward voice. He just needs fewer competing decorations around him.
Quiet toys, loud art
This is the kids sub-system the brand guidelines flagged but never built: Big Kids Build discipline, child-safe register. Five rules drive every screen. The art is the only loud thing. One accent: the child's colour. Pictures before words. Thumbs live at the edges. Grown-up things behind one door.
Pictogram rail on the left edge where the thumb already rests: a dino means dinosaurs. The store banner is gone; locked pages dim quietly and stay put. Photo Magic becomes a card wearing its own "with a grown-up" tag, and the single grown-ups door sits top-right, out of thumb reach, holding settings, purchases and the child's name.
The locked Edge Rails layout, kept and calmed: flat white circles, one hairline, the active tool and the active colour both marked by rings rather than glow stacks. Undo moves below a divider so it stops reading as a sixth tool. Save keeps its green and gains a star, because saving is the reward moment.
Three taps, zero keyboards: pick your circle, pick nothing else, draw. A new artist just gets a colour; naming them is a grown-ups job later. This also quietly gives the app profiles, which today it fakes with a single name field.
One door, one gate, everything behind it: purchases, credits, artists and their names, exports, settings. The same maths-gate logic that already ships, restyled. Kid screens lose every store surface, so a locked page can never strand a four-year-old on a checkout screen.
The sidebar hands the child's colour back to the child: paper rail, charcoal icons, the active spot ringed in Bobby's blue. Category tiles keep their words for readers but lead with the pictogram, and the lock at the bottom of the rail is the same grown-ups door as the phone.
A re-skin plus three flows, not a rebuild
The drawing engine, flood fill, credits, gate logic and storage all stay exactly as shipped. Almost everything above is chrome, and the chrome already routes through one file (BigMarksUI.swift), which is why this is cheap.
| Change | What moves | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| Token diet | Retire white strokes, stacked shadows, tilted badges, gradient banner. One hairline, one shadow, straight badges. Mostly edits in BigMarksUI.swift. | Easy |
| Pictogram categories | Five custom SF-style filled silhouettes (dino, truck, rocket, star, grid) replacing leaf/box/sparkles. Rail on iPhone, tile row on iPad. | Easy |
| Grown-ups door | Merge Settings + Store + credits + name editing into one gated area. Locked cards stop routing to purchase; camera header button becomes a grid card. | Medium |
| Tap-only onboarding | Colour-circle picker replaces the name TextField; naming moves behind the door. Sets up multi-artist profiles later. | Medium |
| Save without the scary dialog | Default save to in-app gallery (already exists as thumbnails); Photos export becomes a grown-ups action, killing the mid-flow permission alert. | Medium |
| Kid-voice errors + custom swatch sheet | Marko sheet replaces system alerts; curated big-swatch grid replaces the system ColorPicker. | Medium |
Order I would build it: token diet, pictograms, grown-ups door, onboarding, save flow, then errors. The first two alone make the app look like the artboards.