Playing Cards: My Designs

These cards will be using simplified chess pieces, in black and white.  To get a nice, clean look to these cards I will be using a combination of Photoshop and Inkscape to create these designs.

Chess pieces will be drawn in Photoshop, before being brought into Inkscape to create vectors and clean up messy edges. 

I started out by looking at the King of Hearts to try to get my overall design style locked down.  I had previously decided to stick with my original idea of using a very limited colour palette of Black, White and Red, which would work well with the clean lines of the vectors.  

Figure 1: Design Variations and Development

I started out with a slimmer King Piece and thought to replace the cross on the crown of the King with it's respective suit.  This caused problems with shape of the King actually being read, as the slimmer shape and absence of the cross made it look like a Queen.  I drew another King based on a different chess set and decided to keep the cross as a cross so not to confuse things.  I wanted the black and white pieces of the chess set to carry through onto the cards so I experimented with subtle variations of white on black, black on white and black on black.

Adding basic detailing to the King, rather than using silhouettes really made the design pop, and somehow made the whole design look more polished.

I plan to follow the design of the bottom right card for the rest of the pack.
Queen's = Queens.  Jacks= Bishops.  Ace= Knights.  Rooks = Jokers.  Number cards= Pawns.

For the Joker I think it would be neat to create a slightly different design- perhaps with the card split into black and white on both diagonals- like a combination of the card viewed both way's up.  This will reflect the wild card status often associated with Joker Cards.

For the pawns I think reflecting them across the black and white in the same way would be too much for a basic number card, so could present these with the number of pawns representing the number of the card, or simplify the design by showing only one on each card but with the number on it.