This week both boys have childcare Monday to Thursday, until 2:30, and our older boy starts at a new school. It isn’t a nine-to-five, but I’m up before the boys, and early mornings and late nights can fill the gap. The last few weeks made one thing clear: this can’t work with every other day off to watch the kids. Four days in a row is something I can work with. For the first time in a while, I feel good about where this is going.
kid.studio also has a new identity this week. The first one, and the app’s style with it, came out of wanting content up and a presence somewhere before the product or the identity had settled. Now they have. Robi is a real design, and the old brand didn’t look like it. So the new one starts from the product, and the mark is the knob. The wordmark is kid.studio in a low, heavy lowercase, and the dot is a red circle sitting where the period would. On the product, it’s the knob. In the icon, it’s the knob, traced from the production design, grip cutouts and all. On Robi’s own wordmark, the same dot sits on the i.
The wordmark section of the identity sheet, draft 5, September 3, 2026.
The rest of the identity came out of discovery interviews and answers from the waitlist. Most of those families found kid.studio the same way, by asking an AI for an alternative to Yoto or Toniebox. One rule holds it together: red is the product. The handle, the knob, the dot. The shell is white, and the color goes on the sleeves. The first candidates are sky, sun, mint and apricot, and that list is far from settled.
The first pictures of the production shell exist, and they are renders, labelled as renders, made from the v4 design: white shell, red handle, red knob, black grilles, and sleeves in the candidate colors. Real photographs replace them the day a v4 unit exists.
Render from the v4 design, September 4, 2026.
What goes on Robi got clearer this week too, in three parts:
- Podcasts are the easy one. They’re published openly, so a parent can find almost any show in the kid.studio app.
- Music is harder. The first plan was Spotify, and the application went out last week, but it may be a dead end. Parents can already send their own music files to Robi, but that’s too much work for most families, so the likely answer is another streaming service. What I need to learn is how willing families are to switch.
- Audiobooks come from the library. Most libraries in the US lend them through an app called Libby, and getting Libby audiobooks onto Robi takes a developer application with a sponsor library. Plenty of libraries could sponsor us. I’d love for it to be ours, so we can donate some Robis and hear from families in our own community. Our local library answered my note and wants a call, but it’s early.
Also this week: forty Raspberry Pis are on order for the beta, though stock is thin and the first delivery date has already moved once. And the site in the new identity is built and merged.
Kickstarter: early 2027. Price: $149, preliminary.