Product & Brand Design · I-Based (爱本源), Shanghai · 2021 · Freelance
In sexuality education the hard part is not the information. It is who has to speak first.
I-Based is a sexuality education startup founded by Mavis Chen, who had just finished her PhD in the field when we met at an entrepreneurial workshop in Shanghai. She asked me to design her brand; the work grew into the company's first product.
The result is a card game for children and parents. Every card carries a question — and because the card asks it, neither the child nor the adult has to be the one to bring the subject up. Built on UNESCO's international guidance, organised into five competencies, and scaled across three age bands so the same system can hold a six-year-old and a seventeen-year-old.
This is the project that shows judgement, not just craft. It is design applied to a socially sensitive problem, built with a domain expert, grounded in an internationally recognised framework. Lead with the design insight — an object that carries the burden of asking — and let the icons, colours and cards appear as the execution of it. Also be explicit that the educational content was authored by a PhD expert and that you designed the system around it. That division of labour makes you look more professional, not less.
I-Based provides comprehensive sexuality education and teacher training in China. Its audience is broad: young people aged 3–25, parents of children aged 0–18, and educators across every school level.
The founder's problem was not a lack of knowledge — she had the expertise and the pedagogy. It was reach and format. Sexuality education in China is shaped by cultural and political sensitivity, and it mostly happens, if it happens at all, in a lesson delivered to a group. What almost never happens is the conversation at home, between a parent and a child, in ordinary language.
My role: I designed the brand identity (logo, business cards) and then the company's first product — the structure, taxonomy, visual system and card design of the game.
Context note: this was my first project addressing a social issue and my first in education. I had no template for it, which meant every structural decision had to be argued from the pedagogy rather than borrowed from a format I already knew.
How do you design an object that makes a taboo conversation ordinary — for a six-year-old, a twelve-year-old and a seventeen-year-old, with a parent in the room?
Three constraints shaped everything:
A child who asks risks embarrassment; a parent who raises the subject has to choose a moment, a vocabulary and a level of detail with no guidance. The design had to remove the burden of initiation from both of them.
What a six-year-old needs to learn about their body and what a seventeen-year-old needs to know about consent, boundaries and online risk are not the same subject at different volumes. But a startup cannot maintain three unrelated products.
In this cultural context, an object that looks clinical or explicit does not get bought, does not get opened, and does not get used. The visual register was a functional requirement, not a styling decision.
The educational foundation is UNESCO's International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education (CSE). Working with Mavis, we distilled it into five competencies — the abilities the education is trying to build, rather than the topics it covers.
A topic list (“bodies,” “puberty,” “relationships”) tells you what to talk about and stops there. A competency tells you what the child should be able to do afterwards — which means every card can be checked against a purpose, and the same five categories can hold completely different questions at every age.
Three decks — ages 3–6, 7–12 and 13+ — each with 50 question cards, each spanning the same five competencies. The structure stays fixed; the depth scales. Protection at 3–6 asks who the safe adults in your life are; the same competency at 13+ asks what consent means in a friendship or a relationship. A family can move up a deck without learning a new system, and the 13+ deck works for adults too.
Each decision paired with its reasoning — show the artefact next to the argument.
Every card asks rather than tells. This is what makes the game work as a conversation device: the card takes on the social risk of raising the subject, and the players answer as themselves. It also means the parent is a participant rather than a teacher, which is the only role most parents can actually perform here.
The taxonomy is the design. It gives the deck a spine, gives Mavis a rule for writing new cards, and gives players an implicit lesson before the first question is read — that this subject is made of five kinds of capability, not one awkward topic.
Each competency has its own mark and its own colour, applied consistently across every deck. In play, this makes card types instantly distinguishable without reading; across the three age versions, it is what makes them recognisably one family. Colour is doing categorical work here, not decorative work.
Simple, warm character illustration rather than anatomical or photographic imagery — so the object reads as a game on a table, not as a clinical product.
The game is intended to be played with a sexuality education expert present — certified through I-Based's own training programs — to unpack the harder concepts. Rather than treating that as a limitation, it connects the product to the company's teacher-training business: the deck creates demand for the trained educator, and the educator makes the deck work.
A flower growing in a pot — a child growing, flourishing, full of vitality — carrying both the Chinese name 爱本源 and the English name I-based in one mark. It says what the company is for without naming the subject directly, which is exactly what a brand in this category needs to do on a business card, a school letterhead or a parent's WeChat feed.
The product: three decks of 50 question cards for ages 3–6, 7–12 and 13+, structured around five competencies, each with its own icon and colour, grounded in UNESCO's CSE framework and authored with a PhD sexuality educator. Plus the brand identity the company launched with.
How it works: the card asks; the family answers; the trained educator explains what the family cannot. The difficulty of the subject is absorbed by the object rather than left with the people in the room.
My contribution, stated plainly: I turned an international education framework into a physical system a family can play — a taxonomy, a visual language, and an age-scaling structure that lets one product hold a six-year-old and an adult without changing shape.
That when a subject is hard to talk about, the most useful thing a designer can build is not better information — it is a socially acceptable reason to start. The cards work because they take the risk of asking away from the people who cannot afford to take it.
I had never worked on a social issue or in education before, and I did not have the domain knowledge to lead the content. Working with Mavis taught me where a designer's authority ends and a specialist's begins — and that the collaboration is stronger when that line is explicit. My job was to make her expertise usable, not to substitute for it.
This is the same concern that runs through my other work: designing the conditions in which people can trust something — a system, an institution, or each other. Here it was a deck of cards on a kitchen table.
Reference blocks and production notes. Turn the appendix off before publishing.
Brand identity and a conversation-based card game for a sexuality education startup in China. UNESCO's curriculum framework translated into five competencies, three age-scaled decks and 150 question cards — designed so a family can start a difficult conversation without anyone having to raise it.
The deck asks the question, so the child and the parent don't have to. Three ages, five competencies.
Product & Brand Designer (freelance) · 2021 · I-Based (爱本源), Shanghai
Brand identity & business cards · Card game system design · Competency taxonomy & icon set · Colour system · Card layout and illustration direction · Three age-scaled decks, 50 cards each