Sick Cards

What's left of it on the Wayback Machine »

Sick Cards was an offensive greetings cards company. It started as a project we got brought in on at xperience by a chap called Andy — and I ended up doing pretty much all of it: branding the whole site, running the social media, designing new cards, the lot.

The brief I was giving illustrators, on basically no budget, set the tone:

When I left xperience I took the idea with me, and for a while we kept it going with Andy at Genius Division.

The bit I’m proudest of — or least, depending on the day: in a desperate grab for traction, I spent ages tweeting Dom Joly to wind him up, posting as “The Overlord” on the @sickcards account. I even did the introductions myself, with a perfectly straight face:

The Overlord was not a charming man:

Dom Joly finally bit, and it sent a flood of traffic to the site. The Overlord took the win about as well as he took everything else:

It was never quite enough traffic to keep the lights on, mind.

Eventually it fizzled out and we shut it down. I still think it’s an ace idea, though — so this one’s parked. For now. I might come back to it.

Dug this out of my old Twitter while building this page. Me wrapping up the branding, May 2010:

And here I am a decade on, still owning up to it:

A warning before you scroll: these are the ones I redesigned, and they’re pretty disturbing. I mean, that was the whole point. And yes, people did buy them.

There were a lot more than this, but they were even worse. So I’m censoring myself here, for your sake. You’re welcome.