On Clean Design

Ok, so we’re super proud of our infectious disease card battle game. We’ve had a bunch of med-students both at AMSA and elsewhere test it out and like the gameplay, in addition to the fact that folks actually start to recall some pretty epic ID and therapeutics info as a direct result. This makes us very very happy. Making us sad of late, however, was the kinda janky quality of the initial print run, as well as the overall quality of the unboxing experience.

You see, being true geeks, we feel that the unboxing of any product should in of itself also be an event. The folks at Apple get this, in addition to the folks that did the packaging for the Zune, as well as the Flip video camera. Not to get all shallow and commercial on you, but we feel that after being liberated from your hard earned dollars, you deserve to be impressed by the way a product looks, feels, smells, but no, not tastes – we’ll leave that to Jamie Oliver and his Food Revolution (check it out – great show). Anyhowz – it’s about craftsmenship; the point we’re trying to labor. Looking at the Healing Blade on a shelf should envelope you with the feeling of *want*, but not in a Miltonesque ‘Paradise Lost’ kindof way, just good ole fashioned desire. Furthermore, every nook, every decision regarding paper texture, color scheme, font choice, should gently gleam from the paper, like falling into warm fuzzy bed of bliss-cakes. Like pancakes, made with heaping cupfuls of joy .

So we did some digging – turns out, the packaging for the Zune was done by a group called JDK Design, that looked pretty hardcore, with a website that scared us off with words like ‘empathy engine’ and ‘corporate rebranding synergistic strategies’. Well maybe not. The search continued. In the midst of our link-jumping, we came across a design site called the dieline.com, which looked amazing. After doing a quick free-text search on ‘board games’ and ‘packaging’, we came across this revelation, and immediately fell in love:

Mmmmmm. . .tasty!

Epic Use of Space

Oh the chocolatey goodness. The face-melting boldness. This was our guy, one Andy Mangold, who created this re-imagining of the Monopoly box as a sophomore studying Graphic Design at the Maryland Institute College of Art.  But could he truly be the one?

I was born on July 8th, 1988, in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where I spent my childhood climbing trees and pouring countless, passionate hours into my LEGO creations, only to inevitably drop and shatter them on my garage floor.

You had us at hello. So, as we speak, this genius lies awake late into the night, refusing to return to his inevitably super-model strewn bed, frantically, nay poetically hewing together the new prototype of our little game. We just thought we’d share.