Portfolio
GUX | April–May 2022

GUX Playing Cards

Expertise

Illustration

Platforms

print

Deliverables

playing cards
Click images to enlarge them.

Project Overview

These playing cards were designed for the 2022 Game UX Summit taking place in autumn. I illustrated every card and had fun turning the royalty that we are all familiar with into gamers! These cards are meant to educate people about various topics and buzz-words in the Game UX discipline.

Client

Game UX Summit, Fall 2022

The Game UX Summit is a paid UX event dedicated to the video game industry. Its purpose is to allow game user experience professionals and advocates to discuss the current state of UX in our industry, share best practices, and spread our love for science and compelling experiences.

Deliverable

An informational handout about various topics under the game UX umbrella

Target Audience

People who do not know much about GUX and who are interested in learning more, such as:

  • high school students
  • undergraduates
  • UX professionals who what to see what GUX is all about
  • people interested in a career change

Ideation

What combination of topics will offer an overview of the discipline?

I put on my content strategy hat and went to work. Above is an outline I created that I felt would encompass GUX in a broad sense. Game UX is something I wanted to learn more about, so this was very enjoyable for me.

How do I catch the attendees' interest and captivate them enough to read the information being presented to them?

I considered an interactive quest-line where a user would get one book and in it, they would get a clue or have to solve a puzzle to figure out where the second was located. However, as fun as that sounds I think that would require more time and effort than I was able to give to this project. I also don't know how effective it would've been. Would people share answers? It would definitely require user research.

Instead I went the route of making collectibles. I wanted to make art that the attendee would want to keep and not just toss aside.

My first ideas VS my final idea

I explored A LOT of existing game media new and old. I also did a few word lists to help me come up with ideas that weren't as superficial as a couple of my first ideas were.

Fantasy and immersion visuals and motifs are really cool, but I had to acknowledge that it was low hanging fruit and because of that it is also overdone.

After digging in my brain and really making myself think beyond that (which was grueling because I was suffering from creative block for a short period), I was able to explore old board games. There are a lot of old board games, but I wanted to visually represent a media that had stood the test of time–playing cards!

Mood-board

  • I compiled a few colors that are most commonly associated with playing cards.
  • I then looked into typefaces. I discovered Cardo and Mono45 which you can see on popular playing card brands.
  • As for the imagery, I love to manipulate images. I was inspired by the artwork showing kings and queens as letterforms.

Design

Booklets

I originally planned to make booklets, but I would later pivot and make playing cards. Above are some of the covers I had played around with.

As you can see my queen from then was very similar to the one I had made on a playing card. For these, I image-traced playing cards and manipulated them.

The Cards!

I scanned in a deck of standard Bicycle playing cards, so I'd be able to sketch over and manipulate them in Procreate. I then vectorized them in Adobe Illustrator. From there, I would work on the informational sides of the cards and make final tweaks to the vectors.

After trial and error I printed them out at playing card size and rounded the corners. The printing is always the hardest part, but putting it together is fun!

Conclusion

Potential Plans

I'd like to revisit this project in the near future, so I can design a box to house the deck. I'm also considering making the illustrations more exaggerated. For example, the controller one of the kings is holding could be bigger and more pronounced. Another thought I have is to change the opposite half of the VR king to represent a character he's playing in the virtual world.

Thank you for reading!