It's a fair assessment to say that we've made a few rookie mistakes. Unfortunately, the unfinished status of the deck is more or less impossible to remedy before the Kickstarter ends. When we started our research on this (like 3 years ago?) the landscape of custom decks looked quite different, and it seemed reasonable to offer a partially-finished deck on Kickstarter and get the funding to complete it and print it. Now it seems like the standard practice is to complete the design first, and use KS only for the printing costs. We'll definitely be keeping that in mind for future projects.
Not everyone goes into it with a fully-finished project - some like going in partially done. But a fully done deck is easier to advertise since you can show off everything, and the artists who create-as-they-go are in most cases professional designers who know how to work on a timetable and will schedule the work to be completed as the project reaches its end.
Thanks for your post GBAllison!
• Full bleed has been nixed, at the recommendation of just about every serious poker player or cardist who has seen the design.
• I'm actually moving the indices TODAY:) I have a personal preference for wide borders in my graphic design work, and I now realize that that was a silly thing to bring with me into a project like this. I may also shrink them a bit.
• Our Aces will be identifiable, and of course Jokers, but the kings/queens/jacks don't have an identifying trait at the moment.
• Now that we're looking at the very real possibility of failing to meet our goal by the end of the Kickstarter, we're considering how we'll re-launch the deck if that's the case. A matched pair of decks will be a part of that discussion.
• I'll talk to Shannon about one-eyed & suicide cards. That's actually something that hadn't occurred to me, but did occur to one of our team members.
• Glad you dig the pips! I seriously had no idea what I was doing there, but I like the result.
• I 75% like the index font. I feel like it's pointier in the numbers than the letters, and I chose it for the letters. I may be able to adjust the pointiness of the numbers to make it more uniform.
* Nixing full bleed for a project like this is good.
* Indices being moved, yay. Border - I feel it's more of an artistic choice, but I will say that it helps show off your art more if you make them thinner. It's become a popular trend with custom playing card decks.
* Adjusting the font sounds good. In most standard decks with a standard-sized index, the pip is half the height of the value and both are of uniform width on all the cards. It's why "A" and "K" in a deck have nice serifs while "10" is really a line and a racetrack oval!
* Court cards with identifying traits: again, it's a choice. Your deck has a specific theme to it. This also goes for the "traditional" configurations of the court cards. Not every deck must have a suicide king, two one-eyed jacks, a bedpost queen, etc. Naturally, the beer-and-pretzels poker players like them, but in the end it's an artistic decision. Not every deck follows that convention.
Interesting story for you: I have a few tricks that require the spectator to have some knowledge of poker, specifically the hands and their ranks. In my personal experience, fewer than one in twenty people and one in ten adults know anything about poker, so in the end I don't perform those tricks as often as I'd like. The moral of the story is that you need not worry too hard about the standard conventions for court cards, especially for a specialized custom deck such as yours.
