Everyone’s a Critic:
Card Game

Design Center, Fall 2023

This Design Center project challenged students to create an original object that could theoretically be sold in a museum gift shop. In honor of the very many party games I’ve played, I put a spin on The Metagame’s deck by creating a card game based on pieces located at the Georgia Museum of Art. Complete with box design and rules, this fully-functioning card game features over 280 unique playing cards and five game modes repurposed to make critiquing art accessible to the public.

Product Design

Research & Drafts

In the initial stages of the project, I researched various party games that had the potential to be customized for a specific museum. From my personal experience playing card games, I recalled one called The Metagame that combined informational snippets of things from popular culture with dry humor.

I chose to recreate this with art pieces in order to both gain more experience with game production and help make art appreciation more accessible to the general public. Once I settled on my idea, I started drafting potential layouts for two types of cards: Art Cards, which were various pieces from the museum filled with facts and descriptions, and Critique Cards, cards used purely for humor and comparison.

Card Development

Once the content of the cards was decided, I started to compile information and write descriptions for all 183 Art Cards and 100 Critique Cards. I continued to iterate on the card designs during the process, eventually resulting on a final front and back design for both types of cards and over 500 lines of text created for the game.

Card Content

Each type of card is designed for a specific purpose to tie into the game modes picked for the project.

Art Cards have multiple different components displayed on them: the title of the work, the artist, their year of creation, their medium, and a description.

Critique Cards simply contain a witty phrase to prompt discussion and an emblem to reflect the game’s branding.

Branding

Name & Logo

The name “Everyone’s a Critic” was spawned from the classic phrase and its relationship with art critiques. As the game is meant to make art accessible to all players, and as art critics are normally thought to be very high-class or out of touch with the general public, the title turning everyone into an art critic was a great way to reflect its accessibility in a fun and cheeky manner.

The simple wordmark stemmed from the minimal design style of multiple party card games on the market. The two i’s in “Critic” were edited into simple icons of people to further demonstrate the multiplayer aspect.

Box, Manual,
& Card Design

Continuing the minimal themes of the logo, the box, game manual, and card compositions were all designed in tandem with one another. Every piece of the product features a variety of 8 chosen colors spanning the entire rainbow, representing both the wide variety of art represented in the game and the wide variety of players it catered to.

The curvilinear holding elements for the Art Card information informed the design of the game manual and box elements as well, and the person icon from the logo made its way onto the faces of Critique Cards, both card backs, and the inside lining of the game’s box. The result is a simple design system that still catches the eye of potential customers through modern composition and bold colors.