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Personal Playing Cards
Brief:
Design a set of playing cards using your pips. You should design a total of 54 cards. Each of the four suits should have 1-10 plus 3 court cards. The final two cards should be jokers.
Challenge:
Pips:
Create your pictograms using the shapes and symbols provided in the file pips.ai. Use the pathfinder, knife, eraser and scissor tools in Illustrator to shapes into pieces. You may change the letters’ scale proportionally, but do not skew them, distort them or outline them.
The point is to maintain the underlying contours and create new forms by copying and reusing parts of the shapes like a puzzle.
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Cards:
How you design your cards is up to you. However, you may use no more than three colors (2 colors + cardstock). They need not be perfectly symmetrical but design them to be viewed from either direction, like traditional playing cards. Create a pattern for the back of the cards using your pips.
Research:
I wanted to create medieval-style playing cards. I enjoy playing video games and I wanted to pay homage to something that has greatly impacted my life. The different pips represent some of the most common weapons that appear in medieval-style video games.
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Common medieval weapons:
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Bow and arrow
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Staff
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Battle-axe
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Mace
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Sword
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Wand
These were the shapes that were provided. I was limited to specific tools in Adobe Illustrator to create the pictograms. I narrowed the weapons to battle-axe, sword, bow, and staff. These were some of the more iconic medieval weapons that stood out to me.
Final Product:
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Process:
Some of the iterations for the weapons I created. I had a smaller size comparison for the actual size of the cards.
These were the few pictograms that stood out and worked for me. I made a few minor adjustments such as the thickness of the bow and the circles. It helps the reader understand the pictogram even more, especially from afar.
Iterations:
