Cards Against Humanity - xmas 2017 campaign

As you probably already know, I really like cards and card systems. The game Cards Against Humanity is a brilliant example of an open card system and I've posted before about one of the additional sets. 

The other thing that they are famous (infamous?) for, are their seasonal promotions. They have always rejected the traditional marketing dirge sent out around Black Friday and 'The Holidays', by creating some funny and often contentious campaigns. A few years back they sold literal bullshit to people at $5.80 a pop (more on that here). Then there was the Cards Against Humanity digs a really big hole campaign (that one really pissed people off). The 2017 campaign was equally great: Cards Against Humanity Saves America, well someone has too. 

It’s 2017, and the government is being run by a toilet. Last month, 150,000 people paid Cards Against Humanity $15 to save America with six days of incredible surprises. Throughout December, we will reveal the surprises here.

At $15 it was a no brainer. They've always done interesting stuff and given plenty to good causes. To be honest I wasn't expecting much to come my way, just hoped to see some hijinx and the odd piece Trump lampooning, boy was I wrong.

For each of the Six Days I receive a letter and some cards (always great) and then some other things supporting that day's specific campaign. The days are as follows:

  1. CARDS AGAINST HUMANITY STOPS THE WALL
  2. THE GOOD NEWS PODCAST
  3. CARDS AGAINST HUMANITY REDISTRIBUTES YOUR WEALTH
  4. CARDS AGAINST HUMANITY DESTROYS  HOMEWORK
  5. CARDS AGAINST HUMANITY’S PULSE OF THE NATION
  6. CARDS AGAINST HUMANITY SAVES BASEBALL

I'm not going to get into the ideas of campaigns here, I'll add links at the bottom. Today I'm just sharing all the ephemera. First up, the letters:

Then there are all the cards, here's a selection of my favourite combos:

And finally here's some of the other things that I received.

However, I can't for the life of me understand why they decided to save baseball.

IMG_0063.jpg

Way more than you'd expect for $15. Great work, great idea and lets hope they can continue to create challenging, frivolous and wonderful projects.

Anyway, here are a few additional links to the campaigns and issues:

Strategy cards for the day job

Mostly I keep this blog personal work free. However recently I put together a pack of strategy cards on working with analytics and data for my day job at Qlik, more details here. It was a fairly rapid project, 6 weeks from concept to delivery.

It's been a long time since I made something tangible (mostly digital only these days) and it was a real treat. My colleague James Richardson was the writing lead on them and I co-wrote and art directed (and artworked). The images are almost all from public domain sources such as New York Public Library's public domain archive and PublicDomainReview.org, apart from a couple of stock and a few self taken. We had a tight deadline as we wanted to distribute them at an event so we took two approaches to production. The plan was to get the cards offset printed in Singapore by Ho Printing on 420gsm artboard, then shipped and hand collated and boxed by me. Thankfully that worked out great. However, our back up plan was to use the on demand digital card printing service from printerstudio.com. We got a couple of packs as proofs and I want to stress how happy I was with the service and quality of the cards from Printer's Studio. They are really great, the stock is much lighter 310gsm but they still feel high quality as they have a slight linen texture and the colours are great (see, purchase here).

Anyway here's the cards - these are the offset versions (the colour in these pics is a little off as iPhone and indoors).

UPDATE - explore all the cards here https://murraygm.github.io/qlik-bi-strategy-cards/

Oblique Strategies

Got a pack of the Oblique Strategies cards by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. I've known about them for a while but was reminded of them recently after seeing this pic of David Bowie's deck.

 

I was so happy to discover you can still get these from Brian Eno's site. They are the perfect tool for overcoming creative block and reinvigorating any project. The set contains over 100 (103 in my pack) of simple yet perfect nudges to open your mind - far more useful than the many convoluted 'frameworks' that consultancies like to flog.