As a fun challenge and offshoot of the general playing card hobby, I've been playing around with my own custom card designs. Pretty much everyone has seen or owns a deck of the standard blue or red Bicycle brand decks, but you can go so much further.
My first two efforts are called Filament and Tendril. They use some of the same elements but have quite different feels. In both cases, I was playing with "assymetrical symmtery" where the design at first glance looks very random, but is actually perfectly mirrored and looks the same upside down. This is rather important in the world of playing cards, obviously.
Design wise, I started out by downloading the templates from the US Playing Card Company so I have the dimensions right, then started noodling around shapes in Illustrator. Getting freeform lines and shapes to mirror took a little trial and effort. After that, Photoshop is used to layer lots of things, add depth via shadows and layer effects, duplicate elements, etc.
I'm pretty intrigued with this project and am pleased with that I have so far. Both decks have some unique features (like a "near black", gray bordered card face with subtle design overlays on it, custom pips, and colored indexes instead of standard white) and with at least 54 separate pieces of design in a full deck, there is lots of opportunity to have some fun.
Fun stuff, and with the lovely Kickstarter things like this can become a reality nowadays. Who knows?
