Hello again,
I fixed the pips and made some other designs.
Let me know what you think.
Cheers!
The art is fine. I would make the image a bit larger to better fill out the card.
Your spade still looks confusingly like a club because the lines leading to the tip of the point aren't straight. Pips have to be quickly and easily recognized as their respective suit. The club looks fine.
Think of it like this:
Spade - a single spear-like point
Heart - two curves, joined
Clubs - three lobes of a tree
Diamonds - four points of the gem
These are the elements of a pip that I feel give the pip its essence - and notice there's a numerical progression to it. Your club nails this perfectly, but your spade isn't a spear-like point. What works in most cases for a good spade is to take the "trunk" of the club and attached it to an inverted heart, coloring the whole thing in your "black" color, whichever color you happen to choose for that.
Another perspective based more on shapes than numbers:
Diamond - a square on its point
Heart - take the diamond, make the top two sides into lines that each bisect a circle of that diameter.
Spade - turn the heart 180 degrees, add the stem
Club - take the spade, remove the square and replace it with a circle the same size as the other two.
I fully understand the desire to create a custom pip, and I've seen some great ones. If you have a particular, specific idea behind the choices and arrangements of shapes for your pips, so be it - follow that idea through and make it consistent between the four different suit shapes you invent. If you're making them different just because you want to make a different kind of pip without a specific intent besides that, you're not making a good design choice.
Make a pip too different, it doesn't look so much like a familiar suit any longer. There are special game decks out there that employ cards with pips that are different from the standard - but if you walked into a local big-box retailer, pharmacy or newsstand, would you be more likely to find that special, custom deck or one that employs standard pips? People have been using these pips since before the colonization of America! The French created them, the printers at Rouen tweaked the design and made them slightly different from Parisian suits (but still close enough for easy recognition) and the English copied them off the imported Rouen decks to create the Anglo-American standard we know and use today. Just as there are countless different typefaces for the Roman alphabet and Arabic numbers used in English, an "a" is still an "a" and a "b" is still a "b", and so on down the line - this should hold true for suit symbols as well when created as pips on a card. Make an "a" different enough, it's really not an "a" any longer - it's something the majority of the people reading it no longer recognize, and thus loses its meaning. At that point, it's more of a secret code that only the designer of the typeface knows, a sure indicator that it won't receive wide acceptance.
Please forgive my long-windedness on this. It's not meant as sharp criticism, just encouragement. It actually helped me work out a few concepts on the elements and function of pips/suits. Long story short, be different if you insist, but do so for a specific reason, not simply from a general desire to be different. Make that reason clearly understood to the potential end user of your cards, so they have a "eureka" moment and suddenly know why you made the choice you made. If that can't be done, go back to the drawing board and reconsider the shapes of the pips.
