My smiley face business card party game

By George Webber

Last year I had 250 business cards printed up with :) printed on them and nothing else. Since then I've been finding handy uses for them: writing notes, flirting with girls on the bus, propping up the occasional table, whatever. A nearly-blank business card is a surprisingly useful thing to have around.

The best thing I've been using them for is to make meeting lots of people more interesting. I'm normally very nervous about meeting new people, I'm regularly thrust into intimidating situations, and I meet so many different kinds of people that it's often hard to come up with something to talk about immediately.

Now I ask them to play my game: I hand them a pen and one of these cards and ask them to complete the drawing. No time limit, no wrong answers, do whatever you want. You just have to give it back to me so I can take it home and scan it. Your reward when you're finished is that you get to see the whole collection of what other people have done. And once a couple of people have done one, that stack grows quickly.

I've been collecting these for a while (you can see the full collection on my blog), but last night I stumbled upon Sketch Tuesday (on Wednesday) at the 111 Minna Gallery where dozens of artists from local museums and elsewhere came to draw. This was a particularly fruitful evening for the game, and I've put all of the cards I collected after the jump.

Thanks to Christian, Willa, Tim, Paul, George, Rick, Mae, Kimberly, Jim, Andrew, Lonnie, Adam, Drew, Brandon, and whoever else did one of these for me!

By Josh Ellingson

By Willa Koerner

By Shaenon K. Garrity

By Andrew Farago

By Paul Hayes

By Adam

By Mae

By Christian Davies

By Drew?

By Kimberly?

By Lonnie Shekhtman

By Willa Koerner

By Tim

By Jim

By Ben Collison

By Rick

• [SedanChair]

  Dean, you are the Johnny Appleseed of weird awesomeness

  • [Dean Putney]

    That’s… surprisingly accurate and fantastic. I may get calling cards printed just so I can have them say this.

• [Patrick McCracken]

  This is  a brilliant idea that I want to steal for my business cards. I’m thinking laser cut the smiley out with my name and contacts cut out on the sides.

• [ymendel]

  Nice. I spent quite a while carrying around *completely* blank business cards, inspired by Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid fame. ( http://gapingvoid.com/ for the lazy) I just drew on them myself, though, or actually used them to write down some contact info for someone else. Your way plants the seed of an idea that can grow in many interesting directions.

• [wrecksdart]

  The others are great, and I wish I had that talent…but the first image is definitely… first.  And yes, that makes me feel like a simpleminded fool.

• [jimh]

  Love the Sluggo nose!
  Also, When BoingBoing loads, there is a second where I can scroll down, and then a screen freeze while the ads load that usually lasts a second or two. The first one with the Marilyn pose was frozen on my large monitor at that point and drew some attention from coworkers over my shoulder. It’s NOT actually NSFW, but the line quality is… excellent.

  • [Rob Beschizza]

    We are going to fix our ad-ruined loads with the magic of iframes, imminently. 

    • [Manny]

       Bless you! I’ve been feeling bad about wanting to complain about the ads on an ad-supported site.

    • [teapot]

      Odd request: can you also please make it so that when scrolling down through the post/comments either the whole sidebar is displayed or so the whole thing is hidden. The problem with having it stay half-showing is that to people walking past it looks like I’ve been viewing one page throughout the day…..or maybe put the staff list at the bottom so it is the only thing displaying on the right?

      This is what it feels like when anyone walks past:
      http://i.imgur.com/Mc6ba.gif

      PS: This is a cool project Dean, thanks for sharing.

      • [Dean Putney]

        I… had never thought of it like that. That’s an interesting point, you should be able to slack off safely. I’ll take that into consideration for sure, thanks for letting me know!

      • [Donald Petersen]

        Thanks, teapot.  I’ve been wanting the same thing addressed for ages now, and for much the same reason.  And thank you, Dean, both for addressing it, and for this groovy post!

  • [EH]

    Just a second or two? Lucky! BB is unusable for me without AdBlock.

• [Listener43]

  Your smiley faces made my face smile.

• [Josh Ellingson]

  Neat. Glad to have been included but I’m sure a lot of these artists have no idea that they are getting posted for the masses. Maybe you want to link to them or at least credit who did what?

  • [jimh]

     Yours is awesome too@!

• [Halloween Jack]

  Holy crap these are good.

• [Kimmo]

  Yeah, these are great.

  Call me a total deviant, but Mae’s one kinda struck me as a black woman in the doggy style position letting rip a huge, ignited fart.

  • [Labbit]

     Cannot be unseen!!  D:

• [Shaenon K. Garrity]

  The crowd of smiley faces is mine!

  Shaenon K. Garrity

• [Andrew Farago]

  Yes, I drew Sluggo!