Precious Stones Playing Cards

This set of playing cards is a passion project of mine. Since becoming a graphic designer, I wanted to create something that I could use with my family as we have at many holiday dinners before. My Type & Image course offered the opportunity to create the project of our choosing, as long as it challenges us and the scope was wide enough.

As I had seen in professional poker graphics on television, each suit had unique colors already assigned to them for easy reading and viewing at a small scale. Spades are black, diamonds are blue, clubs are green, and hearts are red. This color scheme matched that of the four standard precious stones, diamond, sapphire, emerald, and ruby.

The first step was creating the gemstone illustrations that would be used in every card throughout the deck. They are flat vectors to be scaled to fit any subject in every card. In some occasions, they were mirrored or edited slightly to avoid exact replicas next to one another.

Each numbered card has the same amount of stones in the illustration as are indicated by the card's value. The two, pictured above, has two stones in the illustration. This was also kept up in the face cards, such as the sword on the jack with eleven stones. The aces, of course, have one large stone in the center of the card.

The backs of the cards are a version of the diamond pattern, made to cover a larger area. These cards required constant idea generation to create unique images on each card. The illustration style is one that was new to me but stays true to my style and my interests.