Crowdfunding Focus: Playing Cards Designers Will Love
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Crowdfunding—raising money for a project or cause from diverse sources via the internet—seems to be the way to bring the next great invention or special interest product to fruition these days. Companies such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo are brimming with the newest ideas and gadgets, just waiting for you, the crowd, to financially back these tiny little seedlings of an idea.
Every so often I’ll share a few of these with you, highlighting either fully-funded projects, or ones that are nearing the finish line to become a reality. Be sure to tell me what types of products you’d most like to hear about in an upcoming “Crowdfunding Focus” in the comments section.
Horror Comic Book Playing Cards
Celebrating the “Golden Age” of comics, this Kickstarter project has a modest goal of $500 simply to print the deck of cards. Each card’s face is adorned with the cover of a classic horror comic book. I’m not a huge comic fan, but the old horror ones just seem so over-the-top and cheesy that they have a certain appeal. I’m not sure I’d actually be able to play cards with them, since I’d be trying to read every last line of type on the colorful and provocative cover art.
As of this writing, the campaign has surpassed its funding goal, with a couple weeks left in the campaign. Stretch goals—extra items in the case of over-funding—include a custom box and custom numbering and suit icons.
This Kickstarter campaign was fully funded early this year, garnering £25,706 in pledges, with a starting goal of only £3,000! The CMYK deck of cards is really for those who have served time in the printing and prepress trenches; for people who bleed CMYK. Okay, let’s just come out and say it: print nerds, like myself.
The 52-card deck lends itself well to print-related parallels. There are 4 process colors and each one becomes a suit in this deck. Each card from 2 to 10 gets a corresponding tint of color (20%-100%, respectively), with the face cards—which are faceless in this case—each sporting a diagonal line of varying thickness. The Jokers add a little whimsy to the set. The color bars and registration targets are set at an angle, which is enough to make any designer’s skin crawl. I think having the colors mis-register would have brought a perfect blend of chaos and color to the deck.
Unlike many Kickstarter projects, the final version of the CMYK cards are available to non-backers of the campaign and can be purchased from the creators. UK-based Hundred Million defines themselves as a company that “designs and makes original products.” You can pick up a CMYK deck for £9.
My self-proclaimed epithet of typographical lowbrow still stands, but even I am in love with The Type Deck. This Kickstarter-funded deck of cards features beautiful designs on both sides of the cards.
Each suit in the deck has its own style, each using a different typestyle and graphic elements. The individual card denominations are described typographically (“Two of Spades,” “Six of Diamonds,” etc.) instead of the usual literal depiction of two spades or six diamonds. The face cards are little works of art, with traditional royalty-inspired designs in red or black for the Jacks, Queens, and Kings with the denomination prominently set on top of the graphic. The artwork for the Ace cards is clean and bold yet has a vintage feel to it. The Joker cards employ the Quick Brown Fox pangram.
I’m not sure how practical these cards would be for actually playing a card game. In addition to the fact that you’d have to carefully read the card’s denomination, instead of being able to visually recognize it, you might find yourself admiring the artwork, and paying too little attention to the game at hand.
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