Hey, Alex,
Please feel free in the future to use the "quote" feature more often and combine your replies into a single post. It's easier to understand with all of the referenced quotes included and takes up less space when it's all in a single post.
Ah, PurpleIce, my young Cardawan - you'll make an excellent Card Knight someday!
May the Deck be with you!
Now, back to you, Alex!
I would like you to go back to Kickstarter and search for a deck called Bicycle Amazing Adventures. Michael Mindes created a deck that I'm rather fond of, and that your deck should be more closely emulating in terms of the design. Your art's pretty good, but there's so much extraneous stuff in the way we can barely make it out in the mess. Compare that to the courts in Amazing Adventures - the steampunk outfits are clear and easy to distinguish, there's a lot of negative space to allow the artwork to really shine, the cards don't have giant title flags getting in the way of the lovely artwork and the cards are of a standardized design layout from suit to suit. Better still, the spot cards are unique but familiar in their design, so people adapt to using the deck very quickly. I'm less of a fan of the typeface used in the indices, but everything else is spot-on. The back design is perfectly suited to the deck's theme.
Now, look at your deck. Strip away the unnecessary line work and pips that serve only to clutter the design. Take your anime character and see if you can make them two-way designs - the only two-way design I'm seeing in the whole deck is one of the two jokers - and jokers are rarely two-way in a pack of cards! Take those indices, use an easier-to-read typeface and size them so your artwork isn't "crushed" by them taking up so much room. Make the indices a standard width (if you aren't using a custom font, adjust the kerning to make it so) and make the value letter or number twice as tall as the suit pip. If you're really in love with your spot card designs, follow the example of the red cards - make the pips black with the curlicues and such around them in RED, so they'll match thematically and stand out a lot more. A faded shade of red would work exceptionally well. Think of a better back design, and for the card gods' sake, ditch the plastic box! Get a real tuck box - even a blank white one with a window is better than those plastic THINGS, which are better suited for decks sold at cheap roadside souvenir stands all along the East Coast, right next to the postcards and the salt water taffy! If you can do a custom box, fantastic! I just read a little deeper and see you're making a custom box. This begs the question, "Why the hell are you showing plastic boxes AT ALL?!?" They're NOT part of the finished product, but people will assume as much because you put them there.
Check your project's home page for a few things:
- You should have black bars on the "pinup" deck from the 1950s as well as the nude version of your design. Kids do wander through KS all the time and parents would be less than pleased to hear you're exposing them to pornography. For the same reasons, remove all of your videos and replace them with PG-rated versions or nothing at all.
- Check your spelling! "Heroin" is a dangerous narcotic made from poppy plants while "heroine" is a heroic female lead character!
- Have someone proofread your project for grammatical errors. If you're not a native English speaker or didn't develop writing skills in school, you're not alone - hire professional help!
- The little joker from the "swim" deck is flashing a boob and looks like it belongs in the unrated version of this deck!
- Did you know the link to your Facebook page is dead over at the KS project page?
Please take everything I've said here as a) constructive criticism, since I really like seeing deck designs go from decent to great with the right amount of tweaking, and b) with a grain of salt, as these are the opinions of one man - I have some experience consulting for playing card designers, but in the end these are my opinions and they may fly directly in the face of what you're trying to accomplish with your deck. Feel free to cherry-pick or utterly ignore anything and everything I've said.
As with any aspect of design, there are rules and you can break the rules - but not simply if you're breaking them for no good reason, or worse, out of a lack of awareness. Break the rules infrequently at most, know the reasons why you're breaking them and insure that they make sense, not just to you but to anyone you want to be interested in your work.
EDIT: on the Queen of Clubs and the Queen of Diamonds, It's "Divine", not "Devine". Divine would be something of the heavens or that is exquisite and beautiful, while Devine - it it existed as anything other than a proper noun or family name - would probably be the act of removing vines from a specific place...
