I'd like to start a thread for basic questions (and hopefully more advanced questions) from someone that wants to design a deck of cards. Please feel to populate the thread with your design questions too.

I'd like more information about standard court cards. Many decks either create custom court cards or they use standard court cards. How can designers use standard court cards or modify them? For example, aren't Bicycle's court cards protected by both trademarks and copyright? Does Bicycle licence them to you for free if you create a back design and tuck case?

Hello PlayingCardForum.

I'm an expat living in Japan. I've been here for 13 years and it is my home.

While I'm interested in what magicians can do and the amazing card tricks they perform, my main interest in cards consists of talking and drinking beer with my friends as we use them in our card games.

I appreciate all the hard work and artistry involved in making them. I recently started collecting. I buy two decks of the decks that interest me. I put one away, and open one. However, because I live in Japan, shipping kills my pocket book. Luckily I have friends that go back to America during major holidays throughout the year. I try to take advantage of the free shipping to locations in the US, and have my friends "mule" my decks back for me. In the end, I probably spend the same amount of money on beer thanking them as shipping would cost, but I prefer that. So do they.

Like everyone, I really admire many of the Uusi decks, the King's Wild Project's Federal 52 series and stayed up until 1:00am Japan time this morning to purchase two Encarded Zenith decks. I hope to learn more about making cards and get the heads up on some of the amazing decks in the pipeline from artists on this board.

Tip: With Kickstarter, the default search box really needs to improve. Searching for playing cards doesn't return the desired results all the time. With a little digging, they have more advanced search capabilities. I've found the best way to search for playing card projects is to search the whole site for playing cards based on launch date. Just bookmark this:

https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/advanced?term=playing+cards&sort=launch_date

and it will bring up all the Kickstarter projects by launch date and you're only a click of a load more button away from seeing more projects.

Help:

My Photoshop skills are OK, but haven't used Illustrator before.  I would love to find some step-by-step video tutorials on how to make my own Kickstarter deck in the future. Links and recommendations are welcome. Thanks in advance. Until then, I'll continue the planning phase and drawing on paper. Hopefully one day I can start my own thread about a deck I've designed.

Troy

I also wanted to thank Don Boyer for helping me resolve my registration/account problems because of either my VPN or my Japanese IP address. Friendly help before I was even a member. Pretty cool.