❖ Version History ❖

13th of July, 2020
Now that the front facing designs have come so far, it is time to start thinking about what the back facing side of these designs might look like. Before I even begin I have several design rules that I want to specifically set:

1. I want the cards to feature the same reflective style artwork that Bicycle Cards do, where when the card is turned upside-down it features the same appearance as if it were flipped.

2. I want the card artwork on the back side of the card to be substantially desaturated and bland in color to create a stark difference from the super colorful front facing designs. To this end, I planned on making the cards nearly completely white.

3. I want the back side of the card to somehow represent all five seasons in harmony. This is important because a game is only won when one season overpowers the rest.

4. I want to feature as much art into this area of the design as I can so that it is enticing and beautiful without even needing to turn the cards over. To this end, the season symbols and title will be small by comparison.

5. I want the art on the back of the cards to represent even more of a Celtic theme without wholly relying on Celtic knots to make the magic happen. To this end, I discover Celtic beast designs in my hunt for inspiration and those became the feature model for the artwork.

With all of these aspects in mind, I set out to work to see what I could come up with. I start with the title because the font is so easy to work with. I then import the seasonal symbols. I then start reworking the designs of the Celtic knots from the front facing side of the cards into the top & bottom borders to add a nice change in direction for the way these appear on the cards for the eye. Before long I already have the image shown above… but then I set out to create my beasts. Even with inspiration right in front of me, it still took me hours to trace some aspects of an original beast & then change around all of the parts to make it vertically and horizontally symmetrical. After a ton of work I finally come up with this:

I personally love how the beasts stand upon the knots below & frame both the words and symbols that float above. I only need to clean up the designs a little bit more from here to make them perfect, for the tail intersects into itself in a few places where it must be blended, but after a few easy cleaning touches this design is already nearly finished for what I need at the time being.

Now I must focus on another detail that is lacking from the current design… All the way back to the original designs for Calendra, there used to be rule cards given to every player which show the winning hands in the game as a user guide. This detail is super important in the game to help remind what you need to be collecting in order to win… so stay tuned for our next Design Journal when we cover the process that went into designing these cards!