❖ Version History ❖

27th of February, 2022
After all of what happened while editing the Rule Cards up to modern quality, I had some interesting developments take place when reworking the back designs. As written about last time on the Design Journal, I had ended up deciding that a super dark background for the Rule Cards would be nice because it helps differentiate them from the rest of the playing cards, but there are some other elements to that discovery that I have not yet discussed.

While playing around with the layout of the back of the card design, I had been doing coloration edits to see how things would look after a couple of variations. Without exaggeration, I would estimate that I probably spent about 3 to 4 entire days just playing around with the balance, the saturation, the levels, the base colors, the highlights, and the filters… there is no stone I left unturned… my curiosity sometimes is just insatiable.

As you can see up above in the featured image, the card had originally been done up in such a way to only feature some very subtle color, but was mostly white. This had been done intentionally to draw up a stark difference to the super colored front sides of the cards. But when the texture was added to the front color pallets, the back of the card designs felt very flat and underwhelming visually.

So. How are we going to go about doing a better look to this design without taking anything away from the overall aesthetic? Well, in this circumstance, we want to add vibrance and bring up the ‘textured’ feel of the front. However, we do not want to let the graphics on the back of the card overwhelm the front design, so if there is to be any texturing going on here, it is going to have to be more simple than that of the front design.

I came to one idea that I really liked by accident. While working with gradients on things, I occasionally blur base colors to see how they will appear in different tints by moving those blurs around the file. When I did this to the only existing color that was on the back of the original card design (the color within the seasonal logos), I found that the color appeared to like spray paint, and though the initial look at it was terrible, the concept was definitely something I wanted. So, I began intentionally playing with new bolder colors to come back and create a better version of this spray painted look until I was happy.

A new problem arose after messing with the spray paint idea though… because now the middle of the card had some great gradient color tones going on, but the rest of the card did not look great at all, almost totally wrong because of the color no longer resting within the confines of the black lines. So, I started wondering if I could somehow continue the same gradient from the middle of the card all the way around the exterior bleed edge of the card as well. This required some interesting macro scale blurring and color shifting, but once the scale had been upped and the interior of the background dropped down by a significant margin, the final outcome was gorgeous. It was so pretty in fact, that I decided to utilize the same technique as an overlay to the Celtic knots, and this is what really brought the feel of the design home:

I then later came back and added some other features that appear in this final design as well. Most importantly: I decided that the woodgrain texture needed to be brought into the hollow spaces of the seasonal logos to make them pop a bit more. I also felt that the Celtic beasts needed to be made a slightly darker grey now that so much color had been added. I then resurfaced anything that was black back up to a front layer to make sure these black areas remain vividly prominent in the design.

All in all, I really loved the new look. It somehow managed to keep the feel of the ‘white colored back’ despite the fact that there is not even a single speck of space within this design that remained white in the end. And there is another really cool element to consider here as well…

I had originally really wanted the design on the back of the card to be totally clear and legible whether it was being held in the right side up or up side down position, like that of a deck of Bicycle cards. This concept was only offset by the fact that none of the seasonal signs repeat (and the unfortunate fact that only the winter, summer, and autumn logos are reversible). But luckily, not only do the cards appear totally legible from both angles, after cards are shuffled it is super easy to identify if any card has been flipped upside down by accident. This is easy because when the cards are fanned out in one direction, every color matches. So, when spread from left side to right, the whole deck appears blue… but when shifted from right to left, the entire deck appears red:

Overall, I am very happy with the way that the back of these cards have turned out. Once seeing them in the printed form as shown above, I felt that the design here was truly complete. From here, I have three distinct elements of the game that still need refinement:

❖ First, I have a few cards that need some number adjustments, which we will discuss in our next Design Journal entry.

❖ Second, I need to touch up the rule book pretty significantly from its first iteration.

❖ Third, I need to totally redo the box design, which we will talk about explicitly as well.

Before we get to the big projects like the box and book though, the next goal for me is quickly going back and fixing the card balancing numbers. So be sure to check back in to the Design Journal soon!