Wild Cards Deck
Project Goal: This card deck was created as a stylized deck with also being user-friendly and fun.
Target Audience: Younger Kids
Tools: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Procreate
Role: Illustrator and Graphic Designer
Why? It was a fun way for my family to connect. I wanted to design a deck that was easy to play, for both kids and adults. Numbers are easy to read, the animals used are easy to identify, and colors are easy to distinguish.
The first card I designed was the jack of hearts.
I started by sketching out a basic idea of what I wanted the cards to look like. I then sketched a colored version digitally. After this, I moved to design in illustrator and the final version is the card to the right.
The suits
I early on decided I wanted to have suits be the same animal for the face cards. For example, I wanted my Giraffe to be with hearts. Therefore the heart face cards are all Giraffes. I decided that an elephant, lion, and flamingo would all be very recognizable for kids, therefore they were the best animals to use for my deck.
Number cards
As I got further into my project and my sketching I wanted a creative way for people to recognize the suits on the number cards without being too boring. I decided that for the red suits, I would make the hearts and diamonds look like footsteps and the green suits would look like leaves. It's important to note that at every step of my process, I stepped back to make sure my vision was in line with my target audience.
Back of Cards For my illustration on the back of the card, I wanted something not distracting but an illustration that had a lot of contrast to my animal illustrations. This is important because even as an adult with some decorative card decks it is hard to distinguish between the front and back of the card. Above all else I wanted this deck to be readable in order to actually play easily.
Full deck of cards
Packaging
