Hi Rose,
Thank you for posting about the deck that I designed with help from my Mom and one of her friends, and asking me to tell a bit more about it. We just launched the Kickstarter (
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jessidg/notable-women-in-computing-card-deck) yesterday and have reached 90% of our goal as of writing.
First, a not about design. I would expect folks here to be more interested in small differences between the mock-ups of the cards above and the printed versions. The mock-ups are ones I made in Photoshop, with Times New Roman font and the default spade, heart, diamond, club that come with Photoshop. The actual printed version has a nicer font and more elegant symbols, which you can see on my blog here:
http://jessicadickinsongoodman.com/2014/10/10/18-hours-into-our-kickstarter-were-at-75-of-our-goalThe idea for a card deck came when I was camping with my Mom in August. We were at the same family camp were we've been going for 22 years, and where there's a lodge where we play a lot of hearts and poker. She was trying to design a research poster for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (the largest technical conference for women in the world--8,000 participants this year) and I offered to help. Sitting in the lodge together as card games roiled around us, we talked about her research. She's interested in raising awareness of the impact that women have made in computer science, historically and today. The practical impact is to try and increase the number of Wikipedia pages for technical women who've made important contributions. If this interests you, the third member of our design team maintains a page with detailed instructions on how to get started writing and editing Wikipedia articles for women in computing (bit.ly/NotableW).
As my Mom and I tried to think of ways to help first get the names of important women in computing more widely known and second, encourage people to write and edit Wikipedia pages for them, I thought of the Famous Women of The Civil War card deck my Mom had bought me when I was little to bring on camping trips. It helped me learn the names of women who'd changed the course of my country's history, and helped me feel better about being a woman interested in politics. I thought that a deck like that would work well, with a picture (because it's easier to connect with a person if we can see their faces), some information about their achievements (to remind the reader how much impact women have had), and a link to her Wikipedia page (to give the reader an immediate way to follow-up).
In the next month, my Mom wrote up a possible list, assigning positions in the deck. There are some cool internal structures--all of the ENIAC women are 2s or 3s--and we tried for an accurate statistical representation in terms of nationality, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, cis/transgender identity, academic vs industry, and living vs dead. We even tracked each of those characteristics in a spreadsheet to test ourselves. Then she and our other teammate asked leading women in the field to review the list and rankings.
While she was creating the list, my Mom was also finding those important images. We used many from Wikipedia, only using those explicitly either dedicated to the public domain, or licensed under Creative Commons. I explain a bit on why we used Creative Commons for this deck here:
http://jessicadickinsongoodman.com/2014/10/10/why-we-used-creative-commons-for-the-notable-women-in-computing-card-deck As we developed the deck, a number of the women included in it offered newer, better photos of themselves and in the second edition we'll be including those updates if we got them after printing.
Once most of the images and all of the names were finalized, I took a few days to make all of the cards. If anyone's curious about the design process, I'm happy to answer questions about it, but I like golf, graphic design is deeply interesting to people interested in it and mind-numbing to those who aren't. Before we got too far in the design process, I found a printer (makeplayingcards.com) that had good reviews, a transparent pricing structure, and a willingness to print small runs. For the second edition (the one hopefully funded through the Kickstarter) I'm looking into moving to USPCC, but am still waiting for their sales team to get back to me.
The cards all printed nicely, and there are some great stories about handing them out at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, including getting mentioned at the Plenary in front of nearly 8,000 people, getting retweeted to 500k people by Creative Commons' Twitter account, and the perils of hotel wifi and online payments. But I'll save those for if there is a specific interest, since I'm nearly 800 words in here.
tl;dr: My mom, a friend, and I set out to design a deck of playing cards that helped connect players to the history of women's achievements in computing and we've been wowed by the support we've seen so far. Though I've loved playing cards all my life and own a number of cool decks, I am not an expert and would happily take advice.
Thanks for having me!
Jessica
@JessiDG
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