Fresh From The Field: Totally Legit Game + Networking Events – By Cheyenne Blackburn From Prevue

4 months ago by Iris Kalff

From a simple idea to a full world of cards, characters, and connection, our DA Friend, Cheyenne brings networking to life with Totally Legit.

Fresh from the Field is a weekly article series sharing fresh and inspiring work from the Design Assembly community. Want to submit your work to Fresh From The Field? Fill out the form here.

The brief

My objective: Make networking events fun again. There wasn’t a client or a brief document. Just a name that I loved called ‘Totally Legit’ which was inspired after a catch-up with a friend of mine and felt like an fun jab at imposter syndrome. I didn’t *really* know what I was doing, but I felt inspired to roll with all the ideas in my head at the time. From the name came everything else. The brand. The personality. The tone of voice. The networking events. And eventually (for no reason other than for fun) – a real-world collectible card game operating across Hawke’s Bay. The constraint was that everything had to work across contexts. On a card handed over a cafe counter. On a phone screen. On a website someone stumbles across and immediately gets. And it had to feel like it had always existed — with its own world, its own lore, its own logic. The brief I set myself was simple: Make networking interactive, connective, and fun. Make the design do that work without me being in the room to explain it. The craziest part about all of this is that I designed all 52 cards on maternity leave. So there’s that.

The design response

The most fascinating part of this entire project was that I just trusted my intuition — more than ever before — and believed it would all work out. I had given myself a challenge to follow through on every idea until I’m creatively satisfied. This meant that the moment I said “it would be cool to create 52 cards”, I had to commit to it.

The first decision was the duck. Don’t even ask. I just thought of ducks and rolled with it. Sketched out some rough inspiration, jumped into Procreate, and started playing around with a base character. From the duck came the yellow. Loud, confident, impossible to ignore. The cards were the biggest design challenge. 52 individual characters – each one a playful, slightly exaggerated portrait of a stereotypical professional or business person. The kind of characters everyone in a networking room recognises immediately because they’ve met them, or they are them. Each card had to feel distinct while still belonging to the same world. This process took weeks to figure out and required lots of coffee chats (and laughs) with friends. The cards started as an icebreaker deck for the networking events. Then I started thinking about the lifespan of a card and I didn’t want people throwing them away like a one night stand — especially considering how long they took to create. So I extended the life and value of each card with…. a game. Honestly, my brain is diabolical. The game was simple: Support a local business, collect a card, become Totally Legit. Simple mechanic. Real world impact. No cards in bins. Problem solved.

Every design decision came back to the same question — does this make someone want to engage? The lore made the cards worth keeping. The website made the game self-explanatory. The yellow made the brand impossible to ignore. The map… yes there’s a map too. Crikey.

What started as a name ended up turning into a brand that works against digital fatigue — getting real people off their screens and into real conversations with real businesses.
So the struggle really was that I couldn’t shut my brain up. Every idea was executed during that period. Alongside marketing the first Totally Legit event, I spent time in the background building the lore, creating the website — and then after the first networking event ended, I dragged my two kids along (front pack and all) to drop cards off and deliver a poorly explained pitch about this game I half-created in my head to local businesses. But despite fumbling through these ideas at speed, I learned that I’m quick to add context and polish the idea once it’s out. Actually, looking back, Totally Legit taught me that I don’t die from executing ideas. They just exist and that’s when you can shape those ideas into something tangible, exciting and new for everyone else.

Although it’s still currently in its beta stage, I’d love to see this progress further and I’m working behind the scenes to tie up the loose ends. In the meantime though, I’m still hosting networking events. So there’s that too. But all-in-all, I’ll tell you what… I’m really damn proud of what I’ve created.

Visit the website for if you want to know more – https://www.totallylegit.co.nz/the-lore
I have lots of assets here too, in this Assets Folder on a shared drive.