As the program came closer to completion I needed to think of a name. After considerable thought I came up with "Kid Pix." It waseasy to say, had a nice punch to it and was made up of simple three letter words. (This must be something I am attracted to: my wife's name is Kay and my children are Ben and Art). I liked the way "Pix" referred to "Pictures," "Pixels," and "to Pick," and I liked way the words looked graphically when stacked on top of each other. It also occurred to me that it would probably be easy to say in other languages, though at that time I never imagined that it would be sold around the world. Later, Broderbund decided to rename it and had a company-wide competition to come up with a new name. When none came up, they went to a professional name consultant. He told them that he could take their money and come up with a new name, but it wouldn't be any better than "Kid Pix."

I could have run the Kid Pix name together to become KidPix, as was the style then for program names. I decided against it because I was afraid it was just a naming fad, although today if you do a search on the web the name appears as much one way as it does the other.

As I added new features to Kid Pix, I would try them out on Ben. Anything he had trouble with would be changed. The customer was always right. One day I took a number of computers to Ben's pre-school and tried it out on the children there, most of whom had not used computers before. Within ten minutes of having the children use the program I had accumulated a long list of small user interface changes for the program.

Before I’d finished Kid Pix, Apple came out with the color Macintosh. It seemed that the next logical step would be a color version of Kid Pix. My friend Ken O'Connell always supported my work and insisted that I should sell the program rather than give it away. I felt that as it was, Kid Pix made a great freeware program but didn't yet have enough capability to be a commercial program. Before sending out the finished black and white version of Kid Pix I decided to commit to writing an expanded, color version of the program, which I would sell for $25. In November 1989 I started distributing the black and white version, which included an ad for the color version stating that it would be done by June 1990. (The original black and white version of Kid Pix is still available fordownloading today from shareware web sites like shareware.com.) Writing the black and white version was quite a challenge for me and I had no idea how to program color. I anticipated several months just to convert what I had done into color. As it turned out I figured out the basics of the conversion in about a day, which left lots of time to work on new features.