Traditionally Joker cards are illustrated with a Jester, so this makes identification in common decks simple. However this becomes more difficult in a deck which doesn't follow these rules. Because of this I decided to have a bit of a closer look at Joker cards and how they differ from the rest of the pack.
Joker cards sometimes stand out from the rest of the pack. In many cases they are brighter coloured, feature a full body rather than a mirrored torso like the common character cards. They also do not belong to any suit or have any assigned letter or symbol. "Some early Jokers were specially designed, along with special Aces of Spades, as part of the company's brand identity. " (para.3, http://www.wopc.co.uk/jokers/index.html)
In my research I wanted to see if there was a common symbol that was used to represent the Joker. I found that while there wasn't any consistent symbol across decks many used stars/ pentacles or placed each of the suits in the corners of the card.
The earliest example I could find of the stars on the Joker card is the one in the image below.
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| Figure 1: Early non-standard Joker and Ace of Spades by The London Playing Card Co. (alias Goodall) for Sanderson Bros & Newbould Ltd, c.1912. Retrieved from http://www.wopc.co.uk/jokers/jokers2.html |
Most commonly, Joker cards are simply indicated through the text JOKER placed somewhere on the card, although sometimes a stylised J is used. This however can be confusing when you considered that Jacks are also represented with the letter J.
To summarize, this research didn't really help a lot, as I feel no desire to add a jesters cap to my rook. So I simply made a few variations of the joker card to choose from.
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| Figure 2: Joker Variations |
I feel that the 2nd row, 3rd across is the best design to use. With this placement the text can be easily read whichever way up the card is, but also doesn't conflict by crossing over the black and white areas.
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