Hi,
my name is Chris and I plan to create a custom playing card deck for kickstarter (please excuse my bad english, I am from Germany). My vision is to bring a historical deck to live that represents interesting figures from the renaissance time period in Europe. Each facecard represents a figure and will give hints about his accomplishments. For exmaple the card in the attachement shows Galileo Galilei. His contribution to history could be seen in the use of this telescope to advance our understanding of the solar system which also could be seen as a key element of the renaissance where reason and observation were emerging. So the card contains the figure, the telescope and some of his discoveries.
I plan to lay out most if not all of the cards in this way. Please note that this card is a first version. I am no artist at all but I was lucky enough to find an amazing artist for this project. She has a professional background in drawing and learnt even at the university level about drawing in the renaissance style. In my non artist opinion she quite well used newly developed painting techniques from the renaissance with her own style. For example we can see in the card the clever use of light to create an impression of distance (just imagen the head of Galileo without light and shadow effects, he would look more 2d than 3d and therefore not realistic). An expert could propably explain it much better than me and find a lot more here to point out. But for me everything that makes a painting more realistic, through light, use of proportions or any other means, represents the art style of the renaissance.
That being said, I believe the card needs a bit change since I would like the figure in the focus at all time. Right now the eye wanders first and most of the time to the middle 2 objects. But this was only a first draft to get some ideas.
One or two words more about the card style. I decided that I want the card have an aging effect, when you zoom in you can see imperfections on the pips and corner of the card. I feel that this gives a historical deck a fitting touch. Another thing to point out is that I read a lot here about what card fans expect from a deck. And one thing I see very often is that all the cards must be functional meaning the pips and facecards must be recognizable on a glance so one can easily play poker with it. So my artist stayed as close as possible to the originial pips but added her personal touch to it. I espacially would like to point out that the spades symbol is even incorporated in the background if you check on the right top corner. But I think we might have to do some minor changes here since that spades there and the other 2 corners look different (in shape and 2d/3d effect). But I like the general idea of this to make cards easier to recognize.
So but now I need your help. I would like to make this project a success so that I can not only realize this deck but also start a historical deck series. So your feedback would be invaluable to me. Be as critical as you like. I rather have my feelings hurt now than not selling any decks later.
One more thing, I am not sure yet where to produce the deck and what materials to use. Right now I hear and see a lot about the bicycle card company. I talked to them and they offer 1000 deck production runs in typical bicycle deck quality. But this quality seems...and now I need to be careful....not too special. They use 300gsm card stock which basically is fine. But you could put a lighter under it and see the light shine through. While when you do this with a 330gsm card stock it is light tight. (check out the videos about it by MPC
http://www.makeplayingcards.com/pops/card-types.html). As I see it right now, for a deck that focuses on the look of its art work 330gsm seems the way to go since it would give better contrast on each card.
Another point to consider is that the more a card weighs the easier it is to handle (at least that is what some card magicians tell me). But this is maybe not an important point at all in a collectors deck.
My last consideration is the delivery process. I have seen many kickstarter campaigns that fail to deliver on time or all the stuff the promised. And very often it seems this is because the have a too complicated delivering process (for example they use a producer for their deck and another one for a certain reward and then use a third guy to do the logistic). Not only does this normally add cost to the project and the deck itself it also is way too prone to problems. But now, when using USPCC I actually have no way to avoid this since they don´t offer fulfillment services.
The problem now is that USPCC produced decks seem to have an advantage in terms of card fans trust them. But other companies such as MPC offer, at least as I see it from their website, higher card quality and combine the production and fulfillment process under one roof so it would cost less and is less likely to have problems in the delivery. So I am now a bit torn here. Do you guys have any advice?
Thank you all for your help
Chris
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