Cards Against Humanity’s Latest Pack Is All About Design

Have you ever wondered how famed Mac designer Susan Kare might go about designing a pair of pixel art tits, or how ornery ad legend Milton Glaser might handle a design brief that simply read “cocksucker?” Now you can find out, thanks to a new booster pack for the popular party game Cards Against Humanity, featuring original designs by Glaser, Kare, Debbie Milman, Paula Scher, Erik Spiekermann, and 25 more world famous designers.

Not bad for $10, even if you don’t consider the fact that all proceeds (and many of the designer’s fees) are going to benefit the Chicago Design Museum, a grassroots gallery that exhibits contemporary design.

“The idea for the Design Pack came from a conversation I had with the founder of the Chicago Design Museum, Tanner Woodford,” Cards Against Humanity creator Max Temkin tells me. “He was telling me about the struggle to make this new kind of community museum sustainable, and I was talking about how much I wanted to do an “Artists’ Edition” of Cards Against Humanity, and it just sort of clicked that this would be a great partnership.”

Cards Against Humanity isn’t exactly known for its eye-catching graphic design. In fact, the cards—a random assemblage of profane or taboo words and sayings typed in Helvetica Bold on glossy monochrome stock—are about as simply designed as they get. But that’s certainly not the case with the new Design Pack, which features some graphic design as notable as it is profane.

To design the cards, Temkin and Woodford put together a list of their favorite designers, and asked if they’d contribute designs. “Nearly everyone we asked said yes,” Temkin marvels. “We gave each of the designers one of George Carlin’s famous Seven Dirty Words You Can Never Say On Television, but beyond that, we didn’t give them any limits or requirements.”

Temkin says that he wants the actual designs of the cards themselves to be a surprise for the people who order them, but he gave us a sneak peek at designer Susan Kare and Jez Burrows’ designs for the word ‘tits’, which you can see above. That was enough to get my money: if these two cards are this good, imagine what Erik Spiekermann could do with ‘motherfucker’!

The Cards Against Humanity Design Pack is available for purchase now, and the packs should start arriving at customers’ doors next week.