Hey guys, a friend of mine is going to school for graphic design and she knows I love playing cards so she thought she might try and design some. I quite like what she did and said I'd show you all and ask for feedback/suggestions. She's going for a "sleek, clean" look.
These are opinion-based suggestions, mixed with a little knowledge of card design.
The spades look a bit too harsh with such an angular design and don't closely enough resemble spades pips as we know them. Perhaps cutting off the bottom left and right corners and losing the "stem" would give you a "modern" look while still retaining recognizability. Actually, now that I consider it more, keep the stems - an upside-down spade without its stem would be mistaken for a black heart.
Another option would be to make the pips as outlines instead - except the index pip, which you want bold and quickly recognized.
Personally, when I see a pip, I wonder why some people go angular when trying to make it "sleek" - the pips are very simple shapes to start with. Those spades look more like stripped-down outlines of pine trees. Try breaking down the standard pip into just a small number of basic shapes - square, circle, rectangle, triangle - while still retaining the basic outline of the standard pip shape. For example, a heart - a square diamond shape below, with a circle next to each of the two top lines of the diamond. Invert this and add a triangle to the bottom and now you have a spade. Replace the diamond in the spade with another circle, now you have a club. The diamond by itself should be pretty self-explanatory, but you could make it four diamond squares next to each other to form a larger diamond if you wanted to continue the "breakdown" aesthetic. Want it even simpler still? Replace the triangles with smaller diamonds, and now you've broken down all four pips into circles and squares turned onto their points.
On the courts, the King's clothing is still too busy, while the Jack's is probably more simplified and fitting of the sleek-and-clean look, though I might even take it a step farther. And if you're going for sleek and clean, why are you using the faces of the court characters, practically unchanged? You could update them (a la the Virtuoso decks) or make them abstract (a la the Polaris deck series). If you go outline on the pips, why not just an outline of a face, perhaps with just a single eye visible? Going further, an outline of the garments, with only a few details visible, and even more simplified items held in their hands - what do you think?
(Read 751 times)
