Client Vs Designers by Benny Leung Demonstrates the Value of Playful Brand Storytelling

How This Award Winning Board Game Reveals the Business Value of Playful Design and Relatable Brand Storytelling Approaches

What happens when a creative agency decides to turn the legendary tension between clients and designers into an actual game you can play at your desk? The answer turns out to be something genuinely delightful.

Every marketing director, brand manager, and creative agency founder knows the dance. The client wants revisions. The designer believes the original concept was perfect. Someone mentions the logo should be bigger. A deadline shifts. Coffee gets cold. And somehow, through all of the productive friction, remarkable work emerges from the collaboration.

BLCH Ltd., a Hong Kong-based creative studio, looked at the client-designer dynamic and asked a wonderfully audacious question: what if we celebrated the relationship instead of merely surviving the challenges? The result is Client Vs Designers, a board game that transforms the creative industry's most recognizable dynamic into an interactive experience that makes everyone smile, nod, and perhaps feel a little bit seen.

The Client Vs Designers project earned Silver recognition at the A' Design Award in Graphics, Illustration and Visual Communication Design. The board game offers a masterclass in something increasingly valuable for brands competing for attention: the strategic deployment of playful design that speaks directly to shared experiences. For enterprises looking to differentiate their brand communications, strengthen stakeholder relationships, or simply communicate their personality in memorable ways, the Client Vs Designers project presents a compelling case study in how humor, craft, and relatability combine to create something that transcends traditional marketing materials.

Let us examine what makes the playful design approach so effective and how the principles behind the board game can inform brand strategy across industries.

The Strategic Foundation of Playful Brand Communication

Why would a professional creative studio invest time and resources in designing a board game about the very tensions that define their industry? The answer reveals something important about contemporary brand building.

Modern audiences, whether they are procurement managers at multinational corporations or individual consumers scrolling through social feeds, have developed sophisticated filters for detecting inauthentic communication. Audiences can spot polished corporate messaging from considerable distance, and their engagement with corporate content has declined accordingly. What breaks through audience filters? Genuine personality. Self-awareness. The willingness to acknowledge shared experiences with humor rather than corporate platitudes.

BLCH Ltd. describes their philosophy as believing that quality and originality create compelling storytelling, with each story sparked by an original thought, idea, and concept. Client Vs Designers embodies the BLCH philosophy through the game's very premise. Rather than creating another portfolio piece or capability presentation, the studio chose to communicate their understanding of their industry through a format that invites interaction and creates memorable moments.

The board game approach serves multiple strategic functions simultaneously. The game demonstrates creative capability far more effectively than case studies alone could achieve. The project positions the studio as confident enough in their work to laugh at the challenges inherent in client relationships. And Client Vs Designers creates a tangible object that recipients are far more likely to keep, share, and discuss than any brochure or email campaign.

For brands across sectors, the Client Vs Designers project raises an important question: what shared experiences do you have with your customers, partners, or stakeholders that could be acknowledged and celebrated rather than ignored or managed around?

Understanding the Design Language and Craft Decisions

The creative direction behind Client Vs Designers draws inspiration from a traditional game format while transforming the concept into something distinctly contemporary and industry-specific. Benny Leung, serving as Creative Director and Designer, worked alongside illustrator Step Cheung to develop a visual and interactive system that would resonate with anyone who has participated in the creative process.

The game mechanics assign different rankings to key job positions on both the client and designer sides, allowing players to battle and overpower each other based on their roles. What makes the ranking system particularly clever is the incorporation of "traps" based on the key points that might frustrate each side. Anyone who has received feedback requesting that a design be made "more dynamic" or has tried to explain why a particular typeface choice matters will immediately recognize the frustration touchpoints.

The production specifications reveal careful attention to both authenticity and quality. The chess pieces utilize transparent acrylic cut into specific shapes, with illustrations screenprinted directly onto the surface. The acrylic and screenprint combination creates pieces that feel substantial and distinctive while showcasing the character designs prominently. The board game paper deliberately mimics the material used in traditional versions of the source game, creating an authentic tactile experience that honors the original while presenting something entirely new.

Color choices further elevate the execution. The graphics employ Pantone metallic colors, adding a layer of visual richness that distinguishes Client Vs Designers from mass-produced promotional items. At 145mm by 135mm by 10mm, the compact dimensions make the game practical for desk display or gift giving while maintaining enough presence to be noticed.

The material and production decisions communicate something important: BLCH is a studio that cares about craft. Every choice, from the transparency of the acrylic to the specific paper stock, reinforces the message that BLCH approaches their work with attention to detail and quality.

Building Brand Connection Through Shared Experience

The most powerful marketing rarely feels like marketing at all. Effective marketing feels like recognition, like someone else understands your world. Client Vs Designers achieves the recognition effect by addressing something everyone in the creative industry knows intimately: the relationship between those who commission creative work and those who execute creative work.

The client-designer relationship, when functioning well, produces remarkable outcomes. Clients bring business context, market understanding, and strategic objectives. Designers bring visual problem-solving, aesthetic sensibility, and technical expertise. The tension between client and designer perspectives, when channeled productively, generates solutions neither party could have reached alone.

By gamifying the client-designer dynamic, BLCH creates what communication specialists might call a "shared reference point." When a recipient plays the game or simply looks at Client Vs Designers on their desk, the recipient is reminded that the people who created the game understand their professional reality. The understanding builds trust in ways that credentials and testimonials cannot replicate.

The design notes emphasize that "with every experience, it is the foundation of a long lasting relationship." The relationship-building philosophy permeates the project. Rather than positioning the client-designer relationship as adversarial (despite the playful "versus" framing), the underlying message celebrates how professional relationships grow stronger through navigating challenges together.

For enterprise brands considering their stakeholder communication strategies, the acknowledgment approach offers valuable insight. What tensions or challenges define your relationships with customers, partners, or employees? How might acknowledging relationship challenges openly, with appropriate humor and self-awareness, strengthen connections rather than paper over difficulties?

The Production Journey and Technical Excellence

Understanding how Client Vs Designers moved from concept to physical reality illuminates the planning and expertise required to execute projects of similar ambition successfully. The development timeline spanned October through December 2023, with all work completed in Hong Kong.

One particularly interesting challenge involved the character illustration system. The team made a deliberate choice to create multiple character illustrations for players to choose and select for specific job positions, rather than assigning fixed character designs to each role. The multiple-character decision added complexity to the production process but significantly enhanced the play experience.

The multiple-character approach means that when two people sit down to play, each player gets to personalize their experience. Perhaps one player imagines themselves as a particular character type while their opponent selects a contrasting style. The personalization transforms the game from a simple activity into a form of self-expression, increasing emotional engagement with the object itself.

The research underpinning the project drew from the traditional game that inspired the concept, extracting essential mechanical elements and translating the mechanics into contexts relevant for the creative industry. The translation process required understanding what made the original game work mechanically while identifying opportunities to inject industry-specific meaning into each element.

The detailed production thinking exemplifies what separates memorable brand artifacts from forgettable ones. The team could have created a simpler product with fixed characters and standard materials. Instead, BLCH invested in choices that multiply the value of every unit produced by making each interaction with the game richer and more personal.

Strategic Applications for Enterprise Brand Building

What can organizations across industries learn from Client Vs Designers about communicating brand personality through tangible design objects? Several principles emerge that apply well beyond creative agencies.

First, consider the power of category disruption. When everyone in a particular space uses similar formats and approaches, something unexpected captures attention. Creative agencies typically showcase their work through websites, case study decks, and occasional awards submissions. A playable game that acknowledges industry dynamics represents something genuinely different. Different gets remembered.

Second, evaluate your relationship tensions honestly. Every business relationship contains areas of natural friction. Supply chains have delivery timing concerns. Software companies navigate feature request prioritization. Consulting firms balance depth of analysis against speed of delivery. Rather than treating relationship tensions as problems to hide, brands that acknowledge friction openly demonstrate confidence and build trust.

Third, invest in materials and production quality that match your positioning. Client Vs Designers uses metallic Pantone colors, transparent acrylic, and authentic paper stock. The premium choices cost more than standard alternatives but communicate a commitment to craft that words alone cannot convey. For enterprises that compete on quality rather than price, production decisions in brand materials should reflect the quality positioning.

Fourth, create objects worth keeping. The promotional material landscape overflows with items that recipients immediately discard. A well-designed object that serves a genuine purpose, even a whimsical one, earns space in offices and homes. Physical presence provides ongoing brand reinforcement far exceeding any single-touch communication.

When you explore the award-winning client vs designers board game design, you discover how the design principles combine into something that functions simultaneously as brand statement, relationship builder, and conversation starter.

The Broader Implications for Brand Storytelling

The recognition Client Vs Designers received from the A' Design Award validates an approach to brand communication that prioritizes genuine connection over polished perfection. Silver recognition in Graphics, Illustration and Visual Communication Design acknowledges the technical excellence, creative innovation, and professional execution that define outstanding work in the category.

For marketing departments and brand managers evaluating their communication strategies, several questions merit consideration. Does your brand have a distinctive voice that would be recognizable even without your logo present? Are you creating materials that your stakeholders actively want to engage with, or materials stakeholders tolerate as part of doing business with you? What shared experiences unite you with your audience that remain unexpressed in your current communications?

The creative industry has long understood that brands are built through accumulated impressions across touchpoints. Each interaction either reinforces the intended brand perception or dilutes brand perception. Client Vs Designers demonstrates how a single, carefully considered object can contribute meaningfully to brand building by communicating personality, values, and understanding in ways that conventional materials cannot match.

The personality-as-differentiator insight has particular relevance for organizations in professional services, where differentiation often proves challenging. When capabilities are similar across providers, personality becomes a meaningful differentiator. The willingness to communicate with humor, self-awareness, and craft signals something important about organizational culture that no capabilities deck can convey.

Future Directions for Playful Design in Professional Contexts

As business communication continues evolving, the boundaries between professional seriousness and creative expression continue shifting. Audiences increasingly expect brands to demonstrate humanity, and playful design represents one powerful mechanism for meeting the humanity expectation.

The success of projects like Client Vs Designers points toward expanding opportunities for brands willing to take creative approaches to stakeholder engagement. Annual reports could become designed experiences rather than compliance documents. Client onboarding could incorporate interactive elements that make orientation memorable. Industry conferences could feature custom installations that spark genuine conversation rather than passive observation.

The key insight involves recognizing that professional contexts need not exclude creativity and play. Indeed, the most memorable professional experiences often incorporate unexpected elements that break through routine and create genuine connection. Organizations that master the balance between maintaining appropriate gravity while demonstrating creative capability position themselves distinctively in crowded markets.

For enterprises evaluating their brand communication investments, the question becomes less about whether to incorporate creative approaches and more about how to incorporate creativity authentically. What aspects of your organizational personality deserve expression? What relationships would benefit from acknowledgment? What materials might create the kind of lasting impressions that build brand value over time?

Closing Reflections

The Client Vs Designers board game offers a compelling illustration of how thoughtful design transforms brand communication from obligation into opportunity. By acknowledging a universal industry dynamic with humor, craft, and genuine understanding, BLCH Ltd. created something that communicates far more about their capabilities than any traditional portfolio ever could.

The principles demonstrated in Client Vs Designers (category disruption, honest acknowledgment of relationship dynamics, premium material investment, and creation of objects worth keeping) apply across industries and organizational types. The principles represent a philosophy of brand building that prioritizes authentic connection over polished presentation, personality over perfection, and memorable experiences over forgettable ones.

For brand managers, marketing directors, and enterprise leaders considering their communication strategies, the award-winning work raises a question worth contemplating: what would your organization create if you designed materials that your stakeholders genuinely wanted to engage with, rather than materials you hoped stakeholders would tolerate?