While the company was built around Terrible Lizards, we made a conscious decision not to brand ourselves solely around that game, so we’d always have the option to debut new stuff in the future. To that end, it was important that branding for the company feel very distinct from that of the game.

I wanted our logo to be simple, recognizable, and distinct from the complex, multi-color, and gradient-heavy logos common in the tabletop industry. At the same time, we wanted to convey the fun, laid-back feel of the company. I went with something that felt bold and minimal, which could easily be put on any future products, business cards, and press materials in any color scheme.

This white-on-purple design was the standard, but it also allowed us to flip the logo to the purple color to keep the color branding when printing on white paper, for example.

Terrible Lizards is a competitive tabletop card game about building hodge-podge dinosaurs from pre-existing parts. From the start, we wanted the building mechanic to take full advantage of the tactile nature of a tabletop game. Players actually arrange their cards to make a picture of their dinosaur.

As the sole graphic designer on the project, I wanted the game to appeal to younger players, while also giving more advanced players the information they needed for high-level play at a glance. I used bright colors and big, bold elements to reinforce the game’s sense of humor and compliment the artist’s work.

Practical concerns were equally important: Card colors were chosen to be distinct even for players with red/green colorblindness, and each card type has an identifying symbol in the top left corner, so it can be seen when the cards are fanned out. The cards convey a lot of information at a glance.

Our card designs went through several dozen revisions, with new prototypes being printed and user tested all throughout the process to ensure that the final design would look good and play well.