SHAUN DONIGER

This box set has enough stuff to keep most toddlers occupied for hours—and working on the design for it kept me busy for weeks! All the art for the storybook and activity book was assembled using nothing but the basic character poses and background assets from Sesame Street's library. I would take a character's head from one pose, and combine it with the body, arms and legs from various others, sometimes adding props, changing expressions and eye-lines, as well as filling in some of the missing pieces with illustrations of my own. Background assets were also taken apart, recombined, and rearranged in dozens of combinations to create different settings so that no two spreads looked alike.

Aside from a handful of ready-made activities from the asset library, I also wrote and created most of the content for the activity book as well. The outer box used elements from the design of other "Busy by the Yard" titles, but I came up with the concept of using the crayon texture for the background, with the "real" Elmo stepping out of the frame. My favorite part, though, might have been designing my first (and so far only) crayon wrapper.