Just My Type
Design and development for a party game about fonts and connotations.
The brief
What font would you use in a wordmark for a clown conservatory in France? Memory bleach? A strip mall on the Moon? In Just My Type, use your intuition to propose the most appropriate fonts in a given situation. Be aware: your friends will judge you based on how well you can convince them! Will you be a Helvetica hero or will you be sans-dignity?
Timeline
March 2020, 3 weeks
Context
Solo project for design course
Tools
Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud
A learning game for non-designers
From needfinding interviews with my non-designing friends, I found that many didn’t believe in their aesthetic intuition to create pleasing graphics. As my friend Maria joked, “Even though I don’t use Comic Sans per se, I feel like the fonts I choose turn out about as successfully.”
I designed Just My Type for people like Maria in mind, teaching players about the emotional connotations of typefaces in a safe and fun space. It’s designed to trigger questions like “When do I use this font versus that one?” and “What mood or tone does this typeface convey?”
Playtesting and iterating
Through multiple iterations of the game and rounds of playtesting, I developed and revised the rules of the game around pitching fonts as the core interaction, such that players had to convince their peer judges given a limited hand of fonts to choose from. This yielded maximum chaos but also maximum learning, as the quotes below from previous playtests suggest:
On Coming Soon for a strip mall on the Moon
We need something that the aliens can read, and this font looks like a theremin, so…
On Avenir for a bookstore for vegans
So this font is chic for sure… but not like too chic, y’know? Kind of like quinoa.
On Cinzel for a Himalayan salt lamp emporium
You need a font that’s mysterious and otherworldly, like a healing crystal.
Players were intuitively connecting the prompts judges had to the typefaces they had on hand, which was really exciting. Because the prompts were ridiculous, the justifications were as well (but also no less grounded in the reality of the font).
Getting the game Target-ready
Just My Type is designed with clarity in mind, having a spartan and spare design aesthetic so that all attention can go to the typography of the cards. The cards were designed to ensure a clear hierarchy of information from type family to typeface, and the presence of all type families were balanced so that a properly shuffled deck would always have a good mix.
Outcomes
Through all iterations of Just My Type, I’m always surprised and delighted at just how much fun playtesters have with the concept. Players were laughing at the prompts, and then laughing again at the ways other players try to justify their decisions. I’m confident to say the game achieved its learning objectives, and I hope it gets players thinking about typefaces in the way designers do, which is a personal win.
You can purchase a copy of Just My Type on The Game Crafter.