Process

When the theme for this book was announced, my initial approach was to find some way to track my media consumption in some snarky fashion. I designed a Bingo board with a few of the most irritating themes that consistently show up on the news (eg., “celebrity pregnancy speculation”) and I was going to play for two weeks straight and see if I could “win.”

However, after I designed the board, I was quick to realize that that would: 1. be a really boring book and 2. make the same point that the Celebrity Catastrophe Wallpaper made, just not as well.

By creating a variety of games and presenting them as if I expect the reader to eagerly play along – I was able to shift the point to be about the reader’s media consumption instead of my own.

Form

The activity book format is an entertaining way to invite interaction. The straight-faced sincerity of the children’s books I consulted for research lent themselves well to satirical design, especially for self-referential humor. I decided not to worry too much if the individual games were too easy or too difficult to actually play – I put my attention on creating satirical compositions, and in experimenting with the form to keep my audience surprised and engaged. The puzzles don’t even necessarily need to be solved in order for some level of the satire to be understood.

For this reason, the written instructions ended up being a vital component of each page, providing an additional humorous twist to the designs. For example, one page offers up a “Conservative Sex Scandal Mad Lib,” and suggests that the reader photocopy the puzzle to re-use again and again.

The answer key also provided a method for subversion – as in the case of the final puzzle in the chapter, the “Patriotic Jumble,” which – once the answers are revealed – actually turns out to be a subversive comment about the dangerous shifting definition of flag-lapel-pin-style patriotism as opposed to the stars-and-stripes-and-apple-pie-style patriotism indicated by the visual language of the page.