Hi guys, I am looking for some advice from anyone in the know regarding the printing / finishing process of playing card manufacture.
My wife and I have an architectural studio in the UK and are expanding into product design - and hopefully are going to be producing some playing card decks as well. We have some strong concepts for the design of a limited series of decks but have a query regarding the options in printing a deck.
We are hoping to do the printing ourselves (not for cost, but rather to achieve the effect we want), using manual methods to produce a run of 500 decks - which I am aware puts us outside the remit of USPC or EPCC, however manual press printing on any more than 500 decks just isn't possible to us. Is anyone aware of a way for us to ink the decks then have the finish applied afterwards? I presume this may mean a back and forth from the factory / us which will prove prohibitively expensive. Also it would mean printing full uncut sheets which we do not have the capacity to do, we are looking at manually crafting the individual cards.
There is always the option for us to have card pre-cut and print individually, however it is again the finish that I am concerned with. Raw card will not be adequate for a deck of cards.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Tom
As much as I don't want to recommend them, lybrary.com sells most of the things required to create a DIY deck of cards and tells you what else you'll need that they don't sell. They even sell the right pasteboard and a coating that's nearly if not exactly the same stuff that USPC uses for standard decks. (Pasteboard is the paper used for cards - two outer layers of paper with an inner layer of glue, preferably infused with graphite to make the paper opaque. The graphite means the paper is "black core" while there's a substitute that's used called "blue core" which appears on some less-expensive decks - and then there's the dollar-store decks with neither at the core and you can literally see through to the other side of them when you hold them to a strong light.) They provide simple instructions as well but it might be complicated to create a mass quantity of decks - the process as laid out by them is more for small amounts of cards, like just a few decks or perhaps a handful of custom-designed gaff cards for a magician. If I recall, I think they even sell a CD-ROM with old card faces that you could use either as-is or with some redesigning.
I don't like recommending lybrary.com because they're also known for selling magicians' books as e-books and not paying any royalties to the author/copyright holder, or so I've been told by someone who would know. But I know of nowhere else selling all the gear needed for DIY cardmaking that looks as good as something professionally printed.
If that entire process proves to be too difficult to manage for a short run like yours, there are alternatives, though none of them is what one would call cheap. Most printers won't take a job of that size for fully-custom work, but if you want some standard faces and a unique back, Zazzle.com will do that for you. The handling isn't as good, but they have permission from USPC to use Bicycle faces with nearly any back art you want to provide. Other companies that might help you would be:
MPC -
http://makeplayingcards.comNaipes Heraclio Fournier -
http://www.nhfournier.es/en/home (located in Spain; a subsidiary of USPC)
Card Shark -
http://card-shark.de (located in Germany; works with USPC as well as their own private print shop)
For the quantity you want, none of the better-known custom print shops will take a job of that size.
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