This is the most expensive deck of cards I will ever own. Why, you ask? Because it is a prototype of my first deck, designed by me and printed by the US Playing Card Company. It costs a lot to get a prototype deck made, but beyond the monetary cost this deck represents months of my work, hours upon hours of research, lots of trial and error, and tons of planning. Even if I design another, the effort involved will not be as intense as this first foray into the world of playing cards.

If all goes well, this deck (called Tendril) will be funded by Kickstarter and 5,000 of them will be printed and sent to magicians, cardists, and collectors around the world. The prospect of designing something REAL, a tangible enduring object is really exciting. For decades I've done lots of design but it's all impermanent, digital, and all too easily forgotten.

Tendril, and my associated brand Encarded are hopefully the start of a fun new design adventure that will let me explore all new ideas in a medium I find fascinating. 

Visit http://encarded.com for more, and get them on Kickstarter at http://kck.st/xPNhv7. 

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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?

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Even better when they have a 599 GTO (with 1 of 599 on its dashboard plaque) sitting around and you get to see it drive around a little. Ah, to dream.

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I got a new deck of cards today, and they feature some really beautiful and unique design. Cards these days go far beyond the normal red and blue Bicycle brand most people are accustomed to, and this deck is a neat example of the visual design you can find if you look. I consider cards like this an art bargain, just $5-6 for more than 52 little pieces of interesting design.

The 'Fantastique' deck harkens back to the olden days of magic, when mystical arts and advanced (for the time) machines and gadgets brought wonder to the crowd. As you can see, the art and design is very intricate, but also very clever in the fact that each cards back design is slightly different, which if you riffle through the deck like a picturebook you'll see an nice old-fashioney flipbook. Nice touch. (Of course, once you get the deck out of order you're in for a treat putting it all back, but...)

This deck is still available from it's creators, but is limited and might not last long. Card art is much more than the raggedy old deck your grampa plays solitaire with, so do some exploring and you might find some really interesting things.

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The final, remaining straggler in "Operation Part Out" is this super fine rear wheel. You would feel so very good owning it, really. Please buy my product.

26″ MTB Rear Wheel – Chris King Disc, Sun Rim, Salsa Skewer, Black

Black Chris King disc hub is the central feature, 32 hole and in excellent condition. This hub started life as a normal non-disc hub but was sent back to King for a fresh set of internals and a disc hub shell. Has worked flawlessly for me and other than a little mud has never been abused and has never once let me down.

The hub is laced up to a Sun DS1-XC disc-only black rim using black straight gauge spokes. The overall wheel is very light, very strong and has the instant engagement King is known for. Also included is a (slightly scratched but perfectly working) Salsa skewer, also in black.

View on eBay now!

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The very talented Phil Coffman, founder of the equally impressive Method & Craft put up a very useful tutorial video on "pixel-hinting," which basically boils down to making small adjustments in Photoshop to ensure that vector-based imagery (logomarks, icons, etc) fall directly on the pixel borders. While perhaps a minor detail, it can add up to a large visual difference in crispness and overall quality and is essential for anyone that is creating top-shelf design work, whether for the web or mobile apps. 

http://methodandcraft.com/videos/pixel-hinting-vectors-in-photoshop

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On the Mac, Time Machine is a wonderful automated backup system, but unfortunately for some it wants to do its business every hour. If you make even the tiniest file change during that hour, Time Machine will need to do some heavy indexing and disk operations, then copy everything around and at times it can bring your system to a grinding halt. I got tired of my poor MacBook struggling, kicking its fans on every hour, so I found the very lovely piece of freeware TimeMachineEditor. It's an app that handles the scheduling of your backups, so you actually get control over the process. 

http://timesoftware.free.fr/timemachineeditor/

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We narrowly missed seeing this in person yesterday. A giant, 8-foot tall Legoman washed up (or was placed) on the beach just a few miles from here, but unfortunately the darn police came and collected it before we could lay eyes on it. Bummer.

http://boingboing.net/2011/10/25/giant-lego-man-washes-up-in-florida.html

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This seems pretty empty at the moment, because I will be transitioning my harder-to-maintain custom site over to the ol' Posterous as time allows. So a lot of the content I hope to put here will slowly make its way over in a dribble.

Just if you were wondering.

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I've taken quite a few pictures of nice sunsets over the years, but this one, snapped with my iPhone because that's all I had with me, is still my favorite by a very large margin. Feel really blessed to have seen such wonder.

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