#personal voice project

[wannguyen-blog1]

Personal Voice Project

Mockups, GIF & Statement of Intent

As the printing of the cards would not be done in time for submission on Monday, I’ve created mockups of how they would look like as physical cards using a mockup base from mockupfree.co

I tried incorporating animation into one of the cards and I’ve chosen the Ace of Spades as it’s considered the card with the highest value and the card which you see first opening a deck. The process in order to create the animation was incredibly time-consuming and the result wasn’t incredibly smooth, but if I had more time I would definitely improve upon the animation.

Here is my Statement of Intent for the project:

This project aims to explore the possibilities of using illustrated type in order to replace traditional imagery in playing cards. The Playing Arts project is a primary influence for this project and hence will be researched into along with other artists & designers’ works at re-imagining the classic playing cards. The design will explore the symmetrical properties of the traditional playing cards design and incorporate asymmetrical elements into it to create a dynamic contrast, in addition to using vivid colours to create a modern appearance.

What will be produced at the end is a set of the four Aces with lettering as the main focal point, along with a design for the back of the cards. Mockups will be made to illustrate how the designs would look in physical form and they will possibly be printed as well.

Images are going to be sketched on paper, then scanned and vectorise digitally using Adobe Illustrator, then refined and given colours in Adobe Photoshop. This will provide an opportunity to learn and enhance skills in Illustrator in regard to creating and working with vectors.

Inspirations for the project include Playing Arts project, David Milan & Becca Clason for their stunning work in lettering, Vietnamese studio Kaa for the stimulating and lively use of colours, and ultimately Patswerk for their wonderfully illustrated take on the playing cards.

[wannguyen-blog1]

Personal Voice Project

Final Card Designs - The Aces & Back of the Cards

The final designs are of the Four Aces and the back side of the cards. To sum up, I created the lettering so that they would form to the shape of the suits, and have them reflected for the symmetry that playing cards usually have, when you turn a card upside down and it’s the same thing. However, I played with the idea of ‘opposing/ complimentary’ parts in the colour scheme by using two colours that represent the two prominent meanings of each card:

Ace of Spades - the most spiritual cards with purple represent spirutuality & blue representing psyche;

Ace of Diamonds - a card about values with green for financial values, wealth & red for immaterial values and love;

Ace of Clubs - a card which represents a seeker of knowledge and education, with dark blue meaning knowledge and yellow for curiosity;

Ace of Hearts - a card about relationships and emotional expression, with light pink for love and marriage (pink mixed with white - the colours associated with a wedding/marriage) and red for emotions.

About the corner indicators for the cards, I created a contrast by using a sans-serif A and created custom suit shapes from the shape that the letterforms created.

I also played with the idea of reflection and asymmetricality on the design for the back of the card by having the type seemingly reflect each other but in actuality they refer to two different aspect of card games, their proportions are also different due to the layout that I created. For the theme of type I went with ‘textually’ as the element that ‘reflect’ and connect them together. And to make it contrasting to the main card designs, I did not go with a colourful palette but choose the classic colours white, red and black for the back of the card.

[wannguyen-blog1]

Personal Voice Project

Development of the Card Designs and Colour

After I’ve applied appropriate colours to the design in order to represent the meanings of the cards, I was looking for a way to make the lettering stand out more from the indicators at the corners of the cards. I was trying to duplicate the layers so I could make some refinements and accidentlly created a ‘shaded’ effect which I quite liked, and the colours reminded me of Pepsi or Coca-Cola colours. That led me to experiment and try out a lot of variations on how to make the type pop more. I really like the effect of doubling the layers and having a somewhat ‘3D’ effect on the text with a bit of ‘shine’ at the top, but I knew that it worked better only applied to one part of the image, if done to both paralel sides it would look a bit complicated, and since I wanted to keep the symmetry I decided to look for other ways to make the text stand out. When I was adding colours to the back of the card, I made a ‘shaded’ effect inside the word ‘textually’ to highlight that word and based on that I did the same for the other designs and ultimately I think that worked to create an uniform effect. Whilst the colours for the card designs are the colours relating to the two meanings/ opposite meanings of the card, I decided to keep the classic black, red and white colours for the back of the cards.

[wannguyen-blog1]

Personal Voice Project

Development of the Card Designs

I imported the scanned designs into Illustrator. At first I was going to use the recommended ‘Image Trace’ option to create a vectorised version of my lettering but found that the result were too jittery and didn’t translate very well. So even though I don’t have much experience with Illustrator I decided to draw the vectors and trace the lettering myself, which is a very time-consuming process. While tracing and redrawing I also made refinements to the lettering digitally. After I’m done with the lettering, I then proceed to create custom suit shapes based on the lettering that I’ve done, so that they enclosed the lettering neatly (I also used them to refine any pieces of lettering that didn’t quite wrap around the shape)

[wannguyen-blog1]

Personal Voice Project

Back Cover for Cards Development

I was struggling as to what the design for the back of the cards should be. There were a lot of questions to answer : Is type based too much type? Should I try and attempt a pattern like the other card decks that I researched into? If it’s type-based, what would it be of? A quote? Ultimately I would want the design to be something that reflects the cards’ designs which I have already done, which boils down to the symmetry and reflected manner of the suits and lettering.

I researched into some quotes regarding playing cards that seems to sum up the game enough and short enough to be made into type, and I was also inspired by a portion of my essay in which I mentioned how Japanese as a language allows and encourages designers to ‘think textually’, so I also tried writing it down as a possibility. I began by trying to incorporate all the suits into making a pattern, and creating the outlines as if they were ‘lettered’ in a similar style as the designs, but found it difficult to make a coherent pattern out of them. I went back to look at the patterns other artist have created and noticed that they are usually based on one singular suit, which explains why it might be harder to try and include all of the suits.

Next, I had an idea: to ‘reflect’ my designs that I’ve done, I would try to replicate the idea that I lettered along the shapes of the suits, and so I drew all the shapes into a singular layout and structure. This was more convenient since the diamond shape can be the basis for all the other suits, and the spade has a part which looks similar to the heart shape. Then, I tried lettering the phrase ‘Play Textually’ considering my idea earlier. I found this difficult to do as ‘textually’ is a long word and it was tough to fit it into the lower section of the layout without looking unnatural. Then, I decided to mimic my designs even more by creating something that shows ‘symmetry’, but not quite. I lettered ‘Play Textually’ on the big half of the layout, and ‘Deal Textually’ on the other half (since you deal the cards and play the cards). This reflects the symmetry that I had on the designs, but also is asymmetrical and a change at the same time because the two halves are not equal and ‘Deal’ and ‘Play’ are opposite sides of the equation.

In order to add colour to my designs because I did not want to just go with red & black as they would not make the lettering stand out, I researched into the meaning of the cards and colour studies (which shade/ colour means what) to assign colours to each part of the designs.

[wannguyen-blog1]

Personal Voice Project

Development of the Card Designs

I created the lettering of the Aces based on the idea that the letterforms would form and create along the shape of the suits. I also tried to alternate the styles of the word ‘Ace’ since I want the designs to look like they belong together but not replicas of each other. With the Ace of Diamonds card having its meaning related to financial wealth, I made the ‘f’ the most similar to a pound sign. The ‘of’ in all of the designs are quite similar since I wanted the word to be the part that really tie all of the designs together, however, I still alternated the structure of all the lettering pieces and have them positioned differently.

I sketched the design out on my sketchbook because I could take advantage of the dot grid system, then traced it, filled them in and scanned them in so I could edit the designs digitally.

[wannguyen-blog1]

Personal Voice Project

Further Experimentation

As I had settled on the idea of forming the letters around the shape of the suites, and using the symmetry of a playing card, I decided to further applied it to different suits and ranks like the Queen of Hearts or the Jack of Clubs. The ranks I’ve chosen for each of the suit to try end up having a letterform that wrapped around the shape very well. The diamond in the middle to break the emptiness of the space between the two repeating type is something I really liked in the previous design, but it could not be applied as well because the other suits aren’t symmetrical in appearance like the diamonds, so I tried placing the two hearts opposing each other and having them breaking the middle space. These were quite nice experiments, but what I was suggested was to go for a set of Aces, as these felt like they could be a different project/ experimentation. However, I had recognised that working on the Aces would be more difficult as I would have to try and not make all the ‘Aces’ lettering look too similar and the letters in Ace don’t have as good a starting base as ‘Queen’ or ‘Jack’ when it comes to warping around certain shapes.

[wannguyen-blog1]

Personal Voice Project

Sketches, Ideas and Experiments

I played around with a lot of ideas on how the card design could look like, experimenting with the Ace of Diamonds. Most of them are based on the idea of type and letterforms warping around and forming the shape of the suites. I experimented with using different variations of the name ‘Ace of Diamonds’ and also tried using Japanese, but that did not work out very nicely and so I stopped since Japanese typography is utilised in a very different way. I also tried implementing the meaning of the cards with the design where the word ‘ACE’ is centered, with the diamonds surrounding meaning financial values and the hearts being the romantic values for this card. The other side that I was exploring is the characteristics of the playing card and how they look the same upside down, there’s a symmetry there that could be utilised very well considering the shape of the diamond itself. Therefore, this design proved to stand out quite nicely and I decided to explore further with it. I also tried pplying colours to the designs since I really wanted to incorporate a contemporary colour scheme into the cards, and also play with the idea of reversing and how each side of the card flipped is opposite/different