OUGD504 - Augmented Design - Playing Card Research

Existing Cards

I looked online to find a few examples of decks of cards that have been designed with a specific them, given that this is what I'll be doing. I found some pretty interesting ones, and the variety was a lot wider than I expected. There were two websites which I found particularly useful, www.artofplay.com and vandacards.com.

This set of playing cards was designed by a printers. The suits were replaced with CMYK and the numbers were replaced with tints. Whilst this is a really cool concept, given that my cards will have a wider audience than these, I will probably stick to the traditional suits to avoid any potential confusion.

This set of cards was designed purely using typography. Personally I feel that this is a bit of a gimmick, and the lack of a recognisable shape for the suit would probably make them difficult to play with. The back of the cards are quite classy though.

These cards were designed to test the limits of how much can strip back a set of cards before they become unusable. The contrast between these and the type-based cards shows the room for creativity in designing playing cards.

A lot of novelty playing cards revolve around a simple theme. My favourite example was this bacon themed pack. I just think that it's got the exact right tone of voice for what I need. It's not serious by any means but it still advertises its cause well.







Card Printers

Printing a few packs of cards, cutting them with consistency, and packaging them is a big job, and I don't think it's something that's achievable in the time scale I have, especially given that I'm not in Leeds at the moment and so my resources are very limited. Because of this I looked into websites that can make a custom deck for you.

All the sites I found were American based, which means that the shipping time could be a problem given the closeness of the deadline. I have decided to use MPC, as they have the following benefits.

• No minimum order, which keeps my costs down.
• Lots of options for print finishes and packaging.
• Video guides, so there's less chance of me going wrong, which is important given that the time scale I have will probably only allow me once chance.
• The site has been partially funded through Kickstarter, which gives me more confidence in its credibility.

The only drawback of this company is that I can only design the back of the card, not the fronts. That said, I don't think it would be feasible to design the front of the cards within my timescale anyway, but I plan to mock up a couple to show how they would look at least.