At my core, I’m a writer – I love to share stories and tales that spark the imagination and get people to look at the journeys of their own lives with wonder and appreciation. Secondarily, I’m a designer – my love for the visual arts is only surpassed by the written word, but I am absolutely absorbed in the world of drawing, sketching, painting, sculpting, etc. When I found the community of card designers and collectors, I felt that I had just about passed into Valhalla – the stories and artistic talents that go into every deck are just the types of unions that I most long to experience.

But the path to becoming a creator/designer of playing card decks has not been an easy trail to follow. While I feel competent in my conceptual and design talents, I’m not an illustrator, and this is largely what is required by the norm (marketable and collectible) in the community. So, I’ve begun to dialogue and work with illustrators from around the globe, and I’m finding a lot of excitement in sharing my vision with artistic people who then add their own skill-set ingredients into the mix. These collaborations, I believe, are where the future successes of Lonely Jokers Playing Cards reside.

My current workflow looks something like this:

A quick sketch to get the dimensions and shapes worked out, along with specific details I might want to add to the overall design
A simplistic, clean Illustrator file that reproduces and polishes the concept in basic line-art
A 3D rendering of what I see in my mind’s eye when I think of the concept

Concept design for my project “Widows in Windows”

The real challenge to this process is the next step. How do you take what I’ve created as a concept and turn it into an illustration that is crisp, legible, acceptable by the mainstream collectors and is printable at the size and scale of a deck of playing cards. I’m obviously not designing for the casual player – all they need is the most basic elements of a standard Bicycle deck, and they honestly get pretty annoyed when you deviate from them. So, for those who are looking for something a little different, a little more artistic, where are the boundaries of the plausible and ridiculous?

My current project offers a good example of the hurdles I hope to clear during the development and production of creative decks.

Beneath the Waves

I’ve developed a trilogy of tales that flow chronologically in a timeline from the late 1500s to the early 1600s:

Calypso’s Cauldron’s - the story of a young woman who is shipwrecked and begs Neptune for her life, only to be stranded on a desert island as a sea witch for a thousand years.
The Locker - the tale of a merchant mariner who attempts to protect his sons by seeking out Calypso’s spells, only to lose all of their fortunes (and lives) to the bottom of the sea.
Maelstrom - the story of a boy who watches ship after ship, captains and crews, lost in the pursuit of recovering the lost treasures, only to face his own greed and success or failure at plucking riches from beneath the waves.

For the Calypso’s Cauldron’s deck, I’ve written the story and I’m quite excited about the characters and challenges laid out for them. From the tale, I’m using Calypso’s cutting table (the actual location of her spell-casting) as the focal point of the deck. Instead of the typical pips, I’m using variants that relate closely to the originals, yet are unique and natural in the setting of an island hut. For the courts, I’m planning on crafted items including portraiture (such as a mother-of-pearl cameo on the back of a mirror or brush). And as usual, I’m planning on a puzzle within the deck that isolates specific cards and combines them to create spells for Calypso to cast – recipes of ingredients that when mixed together create a possible destiny for the player.

My greatest concern with this deck concept is in the presentation to the player/collector. As the designer, I can be as creative as I like in the development of the ideas behind the cards, but when it comes to the actual elements employed in the final product, everything becomes a gamble. I can share all of my insights with the illustrator, and can hope for strong artistic influences from them that will make the overall product even better, but we are still ultimately hampered by the gauntlet of what the market will support creatively and financially. The day of the small-time designers (like myself) feel dwindled to nearly nonexistent – there are so many projects hitting the market by large and small studios alike, that many deserving decks are failing simply due to an oversaturation of the field.

This means that a major part of my job, as the designer, is to research and calculate the interest levels of the market before even getting into pre-production – most times, even before getting an illustrator involved in the project. I love my Calypso’s Cauldrons project, but I don’t have the ten-thousand dollars on hand to produce the decks the way I want them, nor the realistic expectation that those decks will be purchased by a market that is getting pickier and pickier by the day. Not to mention the fact that we are all competing creatively for the monthly budgeted dollars in every collector’s pocket – and it sure feels like some studios (a’hem) are coming out with a new pop-culture-inspired deck every three or four hours! (extreme sarcasm intended!)

So here were arrive at the crux of this installment of my shuffled thoughts — what do you, my friends and supporters in the playing card community, think of the cards below? I’m looking first for a gut reaction.

The Eights for Calypso’s Cauldrons — shark teeth (spades), crystals (diamonds),
clover (clubs), and rook hearts (hearts)

Now that you’ve experienced your gut reaction, I’ll share a couple of extra insights:

Yes, it’s bright and bold in color and tones.
Yes, it’s busy and loaded with tons of elements that capture the attention.
And yes, it’s quite different than what you could ever expect to get from a standard Bicycle deck.

But is it too different … too “out there”?

To see what it might look like as more simple line-art, I created the following Illustrator file.

This brings the concept back closer to typical expectations, but at a loss for the depth of the emotional depth created by the colors and lighting in the original. I like the notion of printing some of the background line elements in metallic inks (silver and gold), which would allow the full color pips and indices to stand out a bit more, but I’m not sure if the layout is still too busy.

To make matters even more complex, I’m planning on including a puzzle in the deck (which aligns closely with the story I’ve written about Calypso and her enchantment recipes), with some of the elements printed visibly on the cards and other “spell-oriented” elements printed in ultraviolet inks so that the “player” would get a rather ethereal and magical experience with words and symbols that appeared only with the addition of black light.

This goes a little beyond the white background with eight black or red pips and indices in the corners, huh?

So, what are your thoughts? I love getting constructive feedback directly from the folks who are most invested in the market, so don’t be shy.

Modern Design Trials