Hello, everyone! I am new to the Theory 11 Forums and the online playing card community in general, so I will start with a brief introduction. My name is Martin Pulido, and like most here, I love card games (as well as board games). I've run a blog for the playing card game BANG! for over a year now and created various expansions for it. I have recently wanted to get back into drawing and design, and so I created a project for myself: to create a deck of philosophy themed playing cards. I have always loved studying philosophy--it's fun to explore our lives and the world we live in, look for justifications (if any) for our deeply held beliefs, and it also creates great late night conversations. In making a deck about philosophy, I wanted it to be (1) aesthetically pleasing, (2) thought provoking, and (3) functional. An ambitious goal.
Through much deliberation, I determined to organize the suits according to philosophical time periods: spades (ancient and medieval philosophers), diamonds (modern philosophers: 16th-18th c.), clubs (contemporary analytic philosophers: 19th - 21st c.), and hearts (contemporary continental philosophers: 19th - 21st c.). Each card suit also has a unique card face background, highlighting ideas taught by philosophers in the specified time period. These backgrounds are gray or a faint red on white depending on the suit, and I hope help in suit identification. I prefer the white backgrounds/borders as they limit damage from scuffing (or so I believe; maybe I am wrong?).
Each card contains a personally hand-drawn and then vectorized and digitally finished portrait of an important philosopher. I tried to find the most famous depiction of the philosopher, regardless of the medium (sculpture, drawing, painting, photo, etc.) and then redraw it to have a more consistent look across the cards. Many design decisions were tough: I looked up in biographies to discover the hair color of many philosophers, but with ancient philosophers, I just had to arbitrarily decide. I also had to make decisions on clothing.
Since each card, versus just the court face cards, portrayed a specific philosopher, I chose not to include pips. I tried to include some "micro pips" that went vertical up and down the sides of the portraits, but I found these to be too busy and not very appealing. I recognize that this will be a downside for the pip enthusiasts. 12-16 philosophers, however, didn't seem to cut it for the deck, so I had to make a call, which ended up being a lot more work for me! Maybe it was a bad one.
The next step was to make the cards "thought provoking." I concluded to include a quote from each philosopher that wasn't loaded with jargon, so it could be understood by the layman. I also tried not to pick quotes that were (a) cliche, (b) made funny trite statements but said little philosophically, (c) made little sense out of context (Nietzsche's "God is dead" for instance), (d) ridiculed the philosopher by making his ideas appear impossible to understand (Heidegger's statement "The nothing itself nothings" is often used in this respect), or (e) were too religious (this deck is about philosophy, not theology). This required lots of reading, careful selection, and revision to get the right quotes. One of the consequences of including quotes such as these was the inability to have the philosopher's art be symmetrical. My design decisions will make this deck definitely a novelty piece, but I can't see a "thought provoking" philosophy-themed deck being done another way well (very subjective claim, I know). Perhaps it shouldn't have been done at all, then? Maybe.
Anyway, here are some samples of the art: 2 cards from 3 of the suit.
That should give you some idea of the style of the cards I have gone for and substantiate what I claimed about the design above. As for the backs, I have been debating between two designs: (1) a smaller version of a tuckbox art piece that I created. (2) a colored version of the famous Flammarion wood engraving of a man peering into the "true" universe beyond appearances. For the tuckbox, I chose to recreate a section of Raphael's famous School of Athens piece. I kept Plato and Aristotle at the forefront of the piece, but replaced the figures around them in Raphael's version with philosophers from later eras (Bertrand Russell, Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, etc.). I think the piece turned out quite nice, but the artist is usually biased! So I could use that art piece on the card backs or use the flammarion piece. Here is an example of the 2 options with their horizontal orientation:
So on to my feedback questions:
(1) Which back should I use (if any of those 2)? Alex over at Aether Cards has suggested creating a symmetrical back for card game and magic applications, and I think he is probably right. Your thoughts?
(2) What do you think of the overall design? Do I succeed at making the deck aesthetically pleasing, thought provoking, and functional? While I had to make definite trade offs between those different goals, is it overall satisfactory? What suggestions would you make that align with those goals?
(3) Given the non-traditional format of these cards, would anyone besides myself be interested in this deck? I imagine a few philosophy geeks might appreciate them, but would anyone else? Does it have any wider "promise"?
(4) Any other suggestions?
Through much deliberation, I determined to organize the suits according to philosophical time periods: spades (ancient and medieval philosophers), diamonds (modern philosophers: 16th-18th c.), clubs (contemporary analytic philosophers: 19th - 21st c.), and hearts (contemporary continental philosophers: 19th - 21st c.). Each card suit also has a unique card face background, highlighting ideas taught by philosophers in the specified time period. These backgrounds are gray or a faint red on white depending on the suit, and I hope help in suit identification. I prefer the white backgrounds/borders as they limit damage from scuffing (or so I believe; maybe I am wrong?).
Each card contains a personally hand-drawn and then vectorized and digitally finished portrait of an important philosopher. I tried to find the most famous depiction of the philosopher, regardless of the medium (sculpture, drawing, painting, photo, etc.) and then redraw it to have a more consistent look across the cards. Many design decisions were tough: I looked up in biographies to discover the hair color of many philosophers, but with ancient philosophers, I just had to arbitrarily decide. I also had to make decisions on clothing.
Since each card, versus just the court face cards, portrayed a specific philosopher, I chose not to include pips. I tried to include some "micro pips" that went vertical up and down the sides of the portraits, but I found these to be too busy and not very appealing. I recognize that this will be a downside for the pip enthusiasts. 12-16 philosophers, however, didn't seem to cut it for the deck, so I had to make a call, which ended up being a lot more work for me! Maybe it was a bad one.
The next step was to make the cards "thought provoking." I concluded to include a quote from each philosopher that wasn't loaded with jargon, so it could be understood by the layman. I also tried not to pick quotes that were (a) cliche, (b) made funny trite statements but said little philosophically, (c) made little sense out of context (Nietzsche's "God is dead" for instance), (d) ridiculed the philosopher by making his ideas appear impossible to understand (Heidegger's statement "The nothing itself nothings" is often used in this respect), or (e) were too religious (this deck is about philosophy, not theology). This required lots of reading, careful selection, and revision to get the right quotes. One of the consequences of including quotes such as these was the inability to have the philosopher's art be symmetrical. My design decisions will make this deck definitely a novelty piece, but I can't see a "thought provoking" philosophy-themed deck being done another way well (very subjective claim, I know). Perhaps it shouldn't have been done at all, then? Maybe.
Anyway, here are some samples of the art: 2 cards from 3 of the suit.
That should give you some idea of the style of the cards I have gone for and substantiate what I claimed about the design above. As for the backs, I have been debating between two designs: (1) a smaller version of a tuckbox art piece that I created. (2) a colored version of the famous Flammarion wood engraving of a man peering into the "true" universe beyond appearances. For the tuckbox, I chose to recreate a section of Raphael's famous School of Athens piece. I kept Plato and Aristotle at the forefront of the piece, but replaced the figures around them in Raphael's version with philosophers from later eras (Bertrand Russell, Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, etc.). I think the piece turned out quite nice, but the artist is usually biased! So I could use that art piece on the card backs or use the flammarion piece. Here is an example of the 2 options with their horizontal orientation:
So on to my feedback questions:
(1) Which back should I use (if any of those 2)? Alex over at Aether Cards has suggested creating a symmetrical back for card game and magic applications, and I think he is probably right. Your thoughts?
(2) What do you think of the overall design? Do I succeed at making the deck aesthetically pleasing, thought provoking, and functional? While I had to make definite trade offs between those different goals, is it overall satisfactory? What suggestions would you make that align with those goals?
(3) Given the non-traditional format of these cards, would anyone besides myself be interested in this deck? I imagine a few philosophy geeks might appreciate them, but would anyone else? Does it have any wider "promise"?
(4) Any other suggestions?
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