Kickstarter: 7 Questions with Alberto Rodriguez and Moo Hyun Chung of the Daily Critter Playing Cards

Created by Alberto Rodriguez and Moo Hyun Chung, the Daily Critter Playing Cards is a deck of 54 illustrated critter puns based on their website they launched years ago. The idea was to illustrate a pun in the form of a fictional creature (a critter) everyday and the dynamic duo managed to draw over 500 critter puns in the past 5 years! However as life gets busier, updating the site became more challenging.

Recently, Alberto and Moo got together and decided to make a product out of Daily Critter and hence the Daily Critter playing cards was born! We had a chat with Alberto and Moo about their design background, the inspiration behind the Daily Critter playing cards, the design process of the deck and Kickstarter.

Can you tell us about yourselves and what is your creative backgrounds?
Alberto: I was born and raised in the Dominican Republic. Currently living in Seoul, Korea working as a copywriter and art director for an advertising agency. I’ve always liked to make things, write things, draw things and record things, anything that keeps my head busy.
Moo: Also born and raised in the Dominican Republic and currently residing in Rotterdam, Netherlands. I am unemployed. I spend my days drawing things or thinking about drawing things, or going out to draw things.

This is your first Kickstarter Project. Why Kickstarter?
Well, we thought Kickstarter would be the place that would give us the biggest opportunity to make our product a reality, seeing that quite a few playing card projects have been backed through here. We are not sure yet if it was the right choice, but nonetheless, we are enjoying the ride. :)

What is your inspiration behind the Daily Critter Playing Cards? How did you come up with the idea?
We’ve been doing pun based critter illustrations for the past 5 years. At first we thought it would be easy to draw a critter everyday, but with time, we realized that if we wanted to make good looking illustrations we had to give it more than a day. That realization inspired us to come up with the Daily Critter playing cards, instead of doing 365 days of moderate quality critters, we decided to focus on 54 critters and make them as beautiful and funny as we can.

Walk us through the process you took to design this unique deck. How did you get to this finished product? 
Since we were both illustrators, we needed to agree on a style. We ended up deciding that we should do everything with water colors, to match our drawing styles as much as possible. After that, we came up with puns related to the face, ace, and joker cards (Aces were the hardest) and then we went ahead and drew those critters from scratch. We didn’t know to what extent would we take the “everything should be water color based” but once we started is just made sense, to make everything with water colors, including the back of the cards, the logo, the box, and the numbers.

What was your most brilliant breakthrough when designing the deck?
I don’t know if it was a breakthrough, but we didn’t realize how long and how hard it is to make a whole deck completely with watercolors, I mean, even all the numbers were hand drawn, the red number 5 is different than the purple number

What are your thoughts about the continuous strong growth of playing card projects?
Love it! We think of custom playing cards as art that you can play with it, and at least for us, the more, the better. We love this trend, who knows, maybe you guys at Kardify should create your own crowdfunding website specifically for playing cards, we would be down with that. ;)

Thanks for the idea! Haha... Finally, what are your favourite playing card decks?
Alberto: To be honest I got interested in custom playing cards when I started making this one, since then, I really like the Brosmind’s deck and a Tim Burton’s deck I bought recently, I like character decks, specially those that have a character in every card.
Moo: I can’t say I have a favourite deck, but that doesn’t mean I am a stranger to collecting cards. Alberto and I used to collect trading cards and participate in weekly and major tournaments of Pokémon and Magic the Gathering. As to playing cards decks, I am expecting a few that are on their way soon thanks to Kickstarter.

Awesome! At the time of writing, the project is only 16% funded with 18 days to go. If want to support the Daily Critter Playing Cards, you can find it on Kickstarter here. 

Daily Critter Playing Cards will be printed by USPCC and pledge starts from $10.