Structure & Morphology: “Friends” & “How I Met Your Mother”
For the Structure and Morphology project, I chose to work with my roommate, friend, and classmate, Tvesha Shah. When thinking about our choice in movies and series’, we wanted to choose stories that we related to and enjoyed seeing. Our relationship began with the BU MFA program, as young professionals living in a city and trying to build new relationships and turn the relationships we have with our classmates and peers into friendships we considered sitcoms such as Friends, How I Met Your Mother, New Girl, The Office and many more.
Once making the decision to work with Friends and How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM), we took the next step of deconstructing both series; thinking about topics including plot, chronology, conflicts, characters, relationships, setting, iconic items, games, catchphrases and product placement.
From here, we started to deconstruct the visual identity of each sitcom and create design iterations for each show. Once defining the visual identities (typefaces, colors, and overall aesthetic), we started creating illustrations of the iconic objects found throughout each series, keeping the meaning behind each object (both, according to the show and in relation to us) in mind.
Upon completion of this step in our process, we decided that there was still more digging to do in the category of the games played in each series, their purpose and effect, and our own relationship to them.
As we explored these games, our first thought was to make one of the games created by the characters in the shows come to life via our designs. We began to mock up Marshgammon, a game played by the characters in How I Met Your Mother, in which rules from Candy Land, Pictionary, Never Have I Ever and more.
In visualizing Marshgammon, we realized that there were many different ways in which it was helping the characters get to know one another on a deeper level and thought to create our own game. Using inspiration from games we played as children, along with games we play as adults, we created a game structure, which we later simplified into a card game.
For our final product, we decided to use concepts and constructs from many different places including daily affirmation cards, our personal relationships and the sitcoms we deconstructed during our process. We started by building out a visual identity for the game. This included colors, typography, illustration style, language and organization of all aspects of the game.
We came up with four categories for the types of prompts we wanted to include in our game: Relationships & Dating, Friends & Roommates, Career & Education and Personal. Once we had our categories in place we looked back at each of our illustrations and figured out what they represented and constructed prompts with a uniform language in order to tie them together.
Building new relationships, communities and friendships can be hard. The goal of our game, Roomie Relations, is to help you get to know your peers and build strong and playful foundations for new relationships in just 30 days.
