Hi guys! I wanted to share here my KS project, Guns, Jazz and Whiskey. It is a trip to NYC 100 years ago between jazz music, art deco and dangerous people. Link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1726607122/guns-jazz-and-whiskey-in-lower-east-side-lune-playing-cards?ref=project_build
I will be checking this thread, in case anyone has any question they want to ask me. Here some pictures!
Overall, it's a nice style, but I think it would have stood out more if the artwork was more fleshed out. It's just a little too spare for me, almost spartan. The court art could have been made larger, maybe with more detail, and you could have included some background details - something to make this more visually interesting.
The repeated diamond background-to-foreground pattern might stick with the Art Deco theme, but when you have repetition like that in your court cards, it makes them less interesting to look at, almost as if there was a bit of a cookie-cutter approach to the layout. The color palette doesn't help this - while you are trying to stick to a theme in terms of red cards having red characters and black/blue cards having blue characters, it makes all the characters kind of blur together a bit because they all have identical color palettes within a suit. A standard deck doesn't do this - yours shouldn't, either.
"Guns, Jazz and Whiskey." I'm seeing a good deal of jazz. No guns, no whiskey. As I look at the Kickstarter page, there's one court card pouring from a liquor bottle, but that's it. You need to either embrace the theme and go "all in" on it artistically or rework it to cover more of the jazz angle. (And you can call this a nit-picking detail if you want, but there are nearly no "dead end streets" in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, then or now!)
The descriptions of the characters is way off, inaccurate. You call the King of Diamonds a "bartender" when there's nothing about her art to indicate she's associated with any kind of bar or speakeasy, while the Jack of Diamonds, who you call a "newsboy," is the one who looks more like a bartender and definitely not a boy but a middle-aged man. You mixed up the trumpet player and the sax player in the Spades court cards - your descriptions of them are reversed. King of Club as a "sheriff?" More like "chief of police" or "precinct captain." New York is better know for the NYPD and not the NYC Sheriff, who is largely responsible for collecting civil debts to the city government. Granted, we had five separate sheriff departments during Prohibition, but it was still not a position of real "law enforcement" as opposed to the New York Police Department, the far-more iconic law enforcement figures in New York, both then and now. You may feel these are little, minor details, but it all shows what research you put into the topic - whether you looked up the location and period in time to know what the characters there were really like, or whether you decided to make something up on a whim, out of your imagination and memories of movies and TV shows, and pin it to a historical place and time. You make something that's more authentic, people will be more interested, more often than not.
It's a good deck, to be sure - but it could be a GREAT deck with just a little extra work and research.
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