New card designer... Help?

[Trevor Pazzanese]

Hello all! I'm a card enthusiast and i would like to design playing cards. I understand most of the process except for the scanning and what to do in photoshop part. Also, when I first start drawing my design should I print the shape of a card out and draw out the back? when i finish im assuming id buy one deck from the company that I got it printed from then make a promo video or something to promote the deck on kickstarter, and then if its successful id order the amount of decks I could afford? If anybody has any tips, that would be really awesome as I am only 14 years old and this will be my first deck design. Thanks so much!
-Trevor

[Justin O.]

Everyone does it differently and there are a lot of ways to go about it.
I would recommend you sketch your concept, scan it into PS or illustrator and then I would create a layer that will be the card template to get your design oriented correctly. Once that is done you will want to redraw the image in PS or Illustrator to get the line quality you will need for production quality. Most printers recommend a resolution of at the very least least 300 DPI.

Once you have a full deck template made up in PS I would use a place like makeplayingcards.com to print a prototype deck and see how your design works in person, and if you like it you can use it to make a crowdfunding video and start creating your crowdfunding campaign.
Make sure you know what company you want to print through, how many decks you will want to print, what you want to offer backers and most importantly how much shipping is going to cost for anywhere you are going to be shipping ahead of time. Make sure you are very sure of your numbers and what your goal needs to be before you start to crowdfund.

[Don Boyer]

Photoshop is one of the many tools of the trade.  I hear that Illustrator is better, something to do with how it handles vector graphics better - vector graphics are infinitely scalable, raster graphics aren't.

Please, take your time.  There's no rush to create a deck.  You're young, so take advantage of that - use the time to learn the tools, to refine the skills, to become a proper designer.  Then you need to learn the business end of design work.

School isn't necessarily mandatory - I have a buddy who's a working graphic designer and an artist, mostly self-taught in learning how to use computers for design work.  It took him a few years and a lot of self-motivation to get where he is, though.

Sure, there's a lot of people out there who don't learn any of this stuff, one way or another.  They make some of the worst projects imaginable, too.

Meanwhile, this entire board is loaded with knowledge passed down from designers who came before you - LEARN FROM THEM.  Read those topics and posts.