“I wouldn’t have expected mixing a bit style with a punk-rock, DIY aesthetic would work and become something totally fresh and modern, but it does.” —Maria D’Amato
“As a football fan, I couldn’t pass up this project. Brilliant work!” —Viacheslav Olianishyn
Overview: As a soccer fan, Yaheng Li, student at ArtCenter College of Design, enjoys the memes that emerge after matches as fans celebrate their team’s victories or poke fun at their losses. So, he created Meme United Football Club (MUFC)—a forum that spans a website and app—to collect and share these memes. To provide multilingual support, MUFC features a dictionary that lets visitors translate memes from other languages, enabling fans all over the world to communicate and bond over soccer memes. Li hopes that the forum could invite new fans to get involved in the culture of soccer.
To introduce and present MUFC’s concept, Li created six-to-ten images and a marketing video. The mockup for the project was created in Figma and After Effects.
Li eventually hopes to involve AI tech in the development of a meme-curation algorithm as well as in the translating process.
Li developed this speculative project over the course of fourteen weeks, undergoing marketing research, identity design and user interface design.
Comments by Yaheng Li:
Was the subject of MUFC a new one for you? “Absolutely. I had a rough idea about making a project involving soccer for a long time before I began working on MUFC. Born from an idea that echoes concepts I came up with a long time ago, this differed a lot from any other projects that I’ve created. Luckily, I was able to turn the rough concept into a satisfying outcome.”
Did you learn anything new during the process? “Besides experience and a new skillset related to design aspects, Lauren Cantor, the instructor of this studio class who comes from a solid business background, brought me so much precious wisdom and methodologies of things like how to do marketing research and how to create a business model and value proposition, among others. After all this, I realized how rare it is to establish a new project or business that is commercially successful.”
What would you do differently if you could remake MUFC? “Since MUFC targets countless football memes in various languages, the first version was created all in English. In the next phase, I am going to expand it to at least a version in an East Asian language—like Chinese or Korean—and in Spanish, which is the major language in the world of soccer. I may also take more interviews with more people who are not soccer fans to find out if there is a smart way to attract them to dive into the colorful, interesting world of soccer through MUFC.”
