Worthy Opponents
Student Project | Case Study
During my time in college, we were tasked with helping solve a social issue using graphic design. Everyone had to find a social issue that they felt passionate about and create a design to raise awareness and help solve whatever issue we chose. For my project, I chose “False Beauty Standards for Women Driven by Social Media” as my focus. In order to figure out the solution, I needed to to do some research.
When doing research on the issue, I came across countless advertisements that declared certain things to be “perfect” and “all women should look like this.” Deciding that more information was needed, I created a survey that tackled the hard questions of “What age did you start becoming self conscious about your looks” and “Who has told you, you needed to change your apperance?” I ended up getting over 130 responses from ages ranging from 15 years old to their upper 20’s.
71.4%
of survey takers say they became self conscious about themselves before they were 13 years old.
78.8%
of survey takers said that either their parents, siblings, or friends had told them they needed to change their appearance.
94.1%
of survey takers agreed that society values people more based on their appearance.
From the survey, I realized that even though my initial blame for these standards was social media, it seemed that it actually stemmed from people they dealt with on a daily basis. It also seemed that this kind of behavior started way earlier than i had anticipated, which changed the trajectory of my project. I now had to come up with a solution that targeted a younger audience.
After some thought, i decided to come up with something that families and friends do together; play games. I wanted to create a card game that brought and uplifted everyone playing. The idea was that it would be opposite of “Cards Against Humanity”, where this game was actually for humanity. I had to start figuring out what to call it and played around with various names and logo shapes. I eventually landed on “Worthy Opponents” and chose the “W” over the “O” to symbolize a crown over a head, making the logo mark look like a “Worthy Opponent.”
After playing with various color combinations and type choices, I landed on a light teal and golden yellow. I knew I wanted the colors to be playful and mimic the royal colors of a deep blue and gold. For the font, having the type be high contrast with sharp edges was important to resemble the logo icon created, having altered those edges to be more diamond shaped to mimic the diamond on the crown. Once that was finished, the back of the cards needed to be designed, taking the “W” and “O” and creating a fun woven pattern into each symbol while using the brand colors to differentiate between answer and prompt.
For the box design, the idea of “opponent” really stuck out to me and I wanted to represent that on the cover. Ideally, it would show that regardless of whether or not you were an opponent, you were still worthy of the game. Having the castles battle it out was a great way of showing that, while sitting on the hills of the brand colors with the patterns from the back of the cards.
Having the illustrations pop was an added design choice to make them look more like stickers. It was also added to make it stand out from the background and draw the attention of any passerby.
Finally, deciding what to say for the cards was the hardest part. Making sure the prompts and answers gave the same result each time was definitely tricky, but doable. Taking ridiculous sayings and making them fun would be my best bet, and ultimately ended up being the winning strategy. Making sure each person playing felt good about themselves was the end goal of my social project. The end goal ended up being to challenge the negative standards put on children and adults. Even though my starting goal was different from my end goal, I wouldn’t have come to a conclusion without the research taken to get there.
