For whatever reason, I've recently found myself reigniting an interest in card games. The other night my wife and I broke out a deck of standard Bicycles and started playing a bunch of two-player games and having some good old-fashioned analog fun. Afterward I started looking around online to get some ideas for other two-player card games that are fun to play, and I found myself going down a rabbit hole of high-end designer playing cards.
As someone who appreciates clean, interesting design across a variety of media, the discovery of all of these interesting takes on the established paradigm of the 52-card, four-suited deck of playing cards piqued my interest almost immediately. Since a deck of cards always follows the same template, it gives artists and designers just the right amount of restrictions to allow for each deck to establish a personality all its own through subtle tweaks to the pips, court cards, jokers, and card backs. As a matter of fact, playing cards are good examples of symmetrical and functional design in general, so they lend themselves particularly well to some of the clean, modern graphical design trends that are popular today.
Hell, now I've found myself shopping around online for some sweet-looking decks and watching countless deck reviews on YouTube to aid me in my decision-making. I've even started watching cartistry videos, which are really impressive.
People do magic tricks with them, or play card games. Crazy.
Have no clue what I'm talking about? Check out some of the examples below:
As someone who appreciates clean, interesting design across a variety of media, the discovery of all of these interesting takes on the established paradigm of the 52-card, four-suited deck of playing cards piqued my interest almost immediately. Since a deck of cards always follows the same template, it gives artists and designers just the right amount of restrictions to allow for each deck to establish a personality all its own through subtle tweaks to the pips, court cards, jokers, and card backs. As a matter of fact, playing cards are good examples of symmetrical and functional design in general, so they lend themselves particularly well to some of the clean, modern graphical design trends that are popular today.
Hell, now I've found myself shopping around online for some sweet-looking decks and watching countless deck reviews on YouTube to aid me in my decision-making. I've even started watching cartistry videos, which are really impressive.
People do magic tricks with them, or play card games. Crazy.
Have no clue what I'm talking about? Check out some of the examples below: