"Bold and easy" is a design brief, not a lower standard
Thick lines and open fields are harder to draw well than intricate ones. Here is the test we use.
Draft copy. This piece was written during the site build and is waiting on an editorial pass — the facts are checked, the prose is not final.
There is a category of colouring book that treats “bold and easy” as a synonym for “fewer lines”, and the result is usually a page that is simply empty.
Empty is not the same as easy. A page with four shapes on it takes three minutes to colour and then it is over.
The actual brief
Our Bold & Easy family has three hard constraints:
- No line thinner than four times our intricate-family weight.
- No enclosed field narrower than an adult marker tip, so colour cannot bleed from one field into its neighbour.
- No detail that needs a fine liner to reach.
And one soft test, which is the difficult one: the finished page has to still read as a composition from across a room. If it only works close up, it has failed.
Who it is for
People whose hands are not steady. People whose eyes are tired at the end of a day. Children. Anyone who wants to colour while half-watching something else. None of those are a lesser audience, and the brief is not a lesser brief.
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