Purpleice. I knew I had seen these pics before and even did a search before I posted but the thread never came up. Weird
The search function gets a bit fidgety - if searching while on a board topic page, you'll only get results in that board. I think the same holds true with searching while within a topic, though occasionally I'll get results of only posts I wrote containing the search terms. Best results come from searching while on the board's home page.
Don, I don't think you guys are a tiny fraction at all. I'm not trying to cater to any one market - heck, I'm not trying to cater to anyone at all. I know the barbed wire was not a big hit over here. If I had known about this place when I was designing the cards, they probably would have come out differently. By the time the deck was posted here, all the art was done. Plus I love barbed wire. I have barbed wire tattoos. They are bitchin.
I also have seen, from the short time that I've been here, that the audience at The Discourse prefers decks with a more traditional look, something that more closely resembles old-school cards. I came at the entire design from a completely different direction - I grew up on D&D and Thundercats, and so my personal taste in art is heavily influenced by Larry Elmore and Frank Frazetta and Brom, art where there's no such thing as too far over the top. I love the new dragon deck from Albino Dragon - the skull on the back, the lightning bolts, the painted dragons on the cards - and they're not going over really well, either here or at UC.
I do realize that hardcore collectors are going to be less interested in my cards because of the skulls and barbed wire. I kind of regret that, but at the same time, I also know that my personal taste is more Judge Dredd than Downton Abbey. Nothing against a traditional, more refined look at all. I just like skulls and barbed wire.
Thanks for clearing that up. It wasn't really bothering me - I really was smiling at the 'talented artist' bit. I have a myopic tendency to only absorb the parts where people are saying nice things to me. It's how I make sure to never learn anything.
By marketplace, I'm referring to all possible customers - THAT is the market EVERYONE caters to, to some degree or another! For playing cards as a whole, collectors such as us really do only represent a fraction of the market of people who buy playing cards, and many of those others could care less about the things we're interested in here.
It's hard to generalize that people here like or dislike any one thing, really. Some people love skulls and/or barbed wire, some don't. You're only hearing from the people motivated enough to bother putting fingers to keys and giving their opinions. Seriously, if something in your design is something you want there, something that serves a purpose to you, then tell us to go to blazes and go full steam ahead. It's not like there were some serious violations of the rules of design taking place here, and even if there were, you can break such laws, as long as you're doing so for a reason and not for the hell of it or because you didn't know any better.
I can see only one thing that would be of any concern strictly from a design perspective, and specifically the design of playing cards rather than art or anything else. It's actually quite minor. On your indices, you have big, thick bold suit pips. Your value characters (letters and numbers) aren't as bold. Make those pips just a TINY bit smaller and beef up the thickness of the lines in the values and you're good. Indices are one place you don't want to break rules too hard if you want your deck to remain functional.
A standard index has the design it has because it's quickly and easily understood - a Texas Hold 'Em player can peek for under a second and know his hand, without confusion. Suit pips are usually about half as tall as the value characters, and the pips and characters are usually of a uniform width, even the two-digit value of "10". It's why the zero is so narrow and oval and the one is usually presented without any serifs. That's for keeping from revealing anything about your hand - if the "10" was twice as wide as the "2" or any other value, one could simply look at the players spreading their hands a little wider at points to know how many tens they were holding. This logic was also the reasoning behind the invention of double-headed court cards - with the older decks that had full-length court images, if you flipped a card over when it was in your hand, you just gave away the fact that you're holding royalty!
Anyway, getting off my tangent... You don't necessarily need to make the indices larger - cards used to have smaller indices, and in some instances they can actually be advantageous, if somewhat harder to read. But you should make the values more bold in appearance and the pips just a little smaller and less bold - but only a little! Anything else I'd say beyond that would be discussing style preferences, not design rules. Of course, people do make their decks' indices in all kinds of ways - the designer/artist may have other things in mind. But following these rules makes it clear that you understand what the important elements of a playing card are and how to present them.
