Find your corporate brand identity with a card game

Raise your hand if you have ever been forced to sit in on an endless meeting during which everyone struggles to find a unique corporate identity (while you try desperately to fight off sleep).

It’s not fun. But you may never have to endure it again, thanks to the folks behind Cards Against Humanity.

From Kickstarter

We know what you’re thinking: what on earth could a meeting about corporate identity have to do with the ridiculously popular — and delightfully offensive — party game?

As it turns out, a lot. Here’s what is happening: A Chicago-based design studio called Simple Honest Work decided to make internal corporate branding a lot more fun by turning it into a card game. They wanted to create a deck of 100 cards featuring contradicting pairs of words — one word on each side. For example, one card might have the word “fun” on one side, and the word “serious” on the other side. Another card might have the word “simple” on one side and “complex” on the other.

It’s called The Brand Deck. Instead of internal branding meetings featuring boring speeches, companies can instead “play” with this deck of cards. The idea is that a team works together to agree upon, at most, six words that define their brand.

So where does Cards Against Humanity come in? Scott Thomas, who works for Simple Honest Work, was part of the team behind President Obama’s 2008 campaign. One of Thomas’s coworkers on that team was Max Temkin. Temkin is the world-famous designer behind the book Designing Obama. After the campaign, Temkin used his design chops (and, apparently, wicked sense of humor) to create a party game called — you guessed it — Cards Against Humanity.

When Simple Honest Work decided that they wanted to create a game, Thomas knew that there was one person who had to be involved: his old colleague Temkin. “I wanted Max to help us with this for a couple of reasons,” Thomas told FastCo.Design’s John Brownlee. “First of all, he’s a guy who has experience making a lot of cards, which is definitely a skill we needed. But two, he’s just an interesting game maker. We were thinking about how to bring this new game into the workplace, and how to play in that environment, and it just made natural sense to team up.”

Simple Honest Work is kicking off commercial sales of The Brand Deck on Kickstarter. We suspect that decision had something to do with Temkin’s unbelievable success introducing Cards Against Humanity on the same platform. The Brand Deck is available for pre-order starting at $25.

Tags: branding, corporate identity, Kickstarter