The Light Roast journey began two years ago, when I spontaneously sent the following sketch to a fellow web developer, Steve, and asked him if he can understand what they are!
The very first draft of suit designs
Being into playing cards, Steve's short answer was "Yes, I see what you're trying to achieve, but it needs a lot of work!". Of course, he was right! From there, I went over many iterations to get to the design you are seeing now. Here are a few design goals and boundaries that I set for this project:
Use a single module for suits, e.g. only a square or only a triangle.
Avoid curves (yes I know, I have added circles to the background of back design, but I think they're acting as a good filler).
Minimize facial features to the barest possible. The moment I removed the eyes and I still could see a face there, was a YĕėĖĔśsŜ moment! :P
Have uniform skin tone and hair color per court family.
Have a non-traditional layout for number cards. In one of my many trials, I stacked up the suit symbols on top of each other, and I was hooked with the idea. Not only it gives a novel 3D-ish look and feel, but also if you flip through the number cards, you can see an animation effect, like the animated gif image above.
Make the numbers and letters visible and playable. I have some beautiful decks in my collection, but they're not very playable, because of either small or too graphical suit symbol and type design. Therefore, I designed mine to be very simple ,readable, and relatively large for better actual playing experience.
Reuse suit symbols for the back design. The back design is nothing but cutting, cloning, and arranging the suit symbols. The exceptions are the stretched diamonds and triangles, to match the standard card dimensions ratio, and the ripple circles, which is working as a filler.
Finally, I have added a very subtle cream-ish background color to the front side, for a more light-roasty experience!
I love the concept of crowdfunding and also playing cards. I own a growing collection of playing cards and have been a very active backer for crowdfunding projects (more than 30 projects on Kickstarter and Indiegogo so far). But this time I'm trying to be a creator instead, and it's been a big dream of mine for long time, so I really need your help to bring this dream to life!
KickStarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/imaginative-monkey/light-roast-playing-cards
Full Deck Scan: https://cardscans.piwigo.com/index?/category/238-light_roast
