When My Daughter Became My Art Director

Not every project starts with a brief. Some begin by accident — and end up teaching you more about creativity, collaboration, and product design than any client assignment ever could.

That’s how this experiment started: one afternoon, my daughter sat next to me with her pencils and, without realizing it, she became my most honest art director.

Designing Without a Goal (and Finding the Value in Play)

My daily work revolves around systems, strategy, and visual direction. But this time there was no roadmap, no deliverables — just paper, colors, and a question:

“What if we turned these drawings into something others could color too?”

That tiny moment of play became an unintentional framework: create without purpose, observe the emerging patterns, and later identify what could evolve into a product.

From Scribbles to Prototype

I started digitizing some of her sketches and re-drawing them in Illustrator. Soon, we had built a modular visual system:

• Repetitive shapes with variable scales and symmetries.

• Line weights optimized for print.

• Themes that resonated with both kids and adults.

  
  

It was, in essence, a minimum viable product for an illustrated experience: a coloring book. No planning, no market validation — just curiosity and iteration.

Looking back, it followed every step of a product design cycle: ideation, testing, refining, shipping. The insight was simple but powerful: personal projects can become the best R&D labs for design.

Publishing to Learn, Not to Sell

A few weeks later, I uploaded it to Amazon KDP. Not to make money, but to understand the system — formats, categories, keywords, algorithms.

The process taught me more about digital publishing than any course could:

• How print-on-demand works (and its limitations).

• How metadata is a design layer of its own.

• How storytelling can make a product visible in a saturated market.

Publishing became a full-stack design experiment: from layout to distribution.

Spotting Patterns:

From Personal Project to Replicable System

Once the first book was out, I began noticing patterns in what made a coloring book actually work:

• Universal themes with a recognizable visual identity.

• A balanced level of visual complexity — not too easy, not too frustrating.

• Contextual storytelling that framed the drawings with meaning.

  
  

That observation turned into a series: Capybaras monstruosos, Punk Kitties, and El Divo Tribute Coloring Book to Juan Gabriel — each one an iteration of the same creative system. They’re not just books; they’re design prototypes exploring how ideas evolve into modular cultural products.

What the Market Taught Me (and Why I Keep Experimenting)

Uploading a book is easy. Selling one is a completely different discipline.

The coloring book space is crowded, and visibility depends more on digital strategy than visual talent. But each attempt revealed something worth keeping:

• The story behind the product matters more than the product itself.

• Communities outperform audiences — connection beats promotion.

• Every side project can serve as applied research in disguise.

  
  

Instead of chasing quick sales, the real goal became building a repeatable creative system: documenting, learning, refining.

What’s Next: Opening the Process

That’s why I decided to share this story. Because behind every drawing or even a prompt, there’s a design method — and behind every method, a chance to build something meaningful.

Closing Thought

When my daughter became my art director, she wasn’t teaching me to draw. She was reminding me that curiosity, play, and iteration remain the most powerful design tools we have — no matter how old we get.