Designers: Designing the 52 Plus Joker 2017 Club Deck with Alex Chin Part I

It's been awhile since we had a designers series article. This month, we are honoured to have a guest post by Alex Chin, creators behind the stunning 52 Plus Joker Club deck for 2017. In part one of this two-part series, Alex shares with us the inspiration and the design process behind creating the club deck. 

I designed this year's 52 Plus Joker Club deck with the concept of pulpwood in mind. The idea of paper creation as a starting point to create playing cards always intrigued me and this deck tells the story about it.

Inspiration
The running theme throughout the deck really emphasized texture so this entire deck goes above and beyond to highlight those aspects on the deck. The box design features a Mulberry bark tree covering through 3 of the four sides so that it looks unassuming. The fourth side that faces out reveals beautiful gold foiled lattice work and a representation of the designs inside.

I liked this because it helped tell the story of how people harvested the paper from Mulberry trees back then. The box design is the first of its kind to utilize a dual layer tuck box. There have been sleeves before but this was an actual two-layer tuck box.

This was important because we were able to create two different textures without using any embossing plates. The top layer texture features a bark/wood feel that is highlighted on the face with the gold foiling. The bottom layer features the offset detail.

The back design features Expert's Perfecta Foil which allowed me to do a two color foil on the back which turned out spectacular. The gold lattice work with the green shimmering leaves really helped highlight the hierarchy of the back design.

Design
Composition Study: I typically start with the back design and start out with sketching.  This is the composition item that I ended up using.

Depth Testing/ Contrast Models: The important part to note here is that this was based on landscape architecture- a bird's eye view. The idea is that you're looking down at a garden that supports the Mulberry Tree that is going to provide us with this paper. I'm playing for balance here because typically I'll do contrast models of what looks correct.  What is going to be light, what is going to be dark. Because we have plants, growth is a thing so depth became a big focus.

Join us next week for the second part of the designer series with Alex where we look at textures, vectorizing, face cards design and the tuck box of the 52 Plus Joker Club deck.


This exclusive guest post is written by Alex Chin for Kardify. No part of this article can be reproduced without written permission from the author. You can check out Alex's work at Seasons Playing Cards.