OUGD401 PRACTICAL OUTCOME DEVELOPMENT

Following on from my tutorial with my tutor I used the photographs from my research which I had specifically chosen in the first place for them not to be sexy in any way, to show the women in as neutral and empowering a light as possible. I created clipping masks of these photographs with the size of the playing cards, and just moved all the text to the bottom of the cards, so they all aligned at the bottom rather than part way down. I did this so that you could see as much of the face of each woman as possible as most of the photographs had the women's faces in the top part.

Producing my new playing cards design

I found photographs of all of the picture cards to use an a guide for my own designs for these cards, or to use these cards and manipulate them into my own cards.

Here I have taken the photograph of the King of Hearts from above and image traced it on Illustrator, to give it a much more clean and solid appearance, and also to make sure it wasn't blurry. This method also keeps all of the original colours as well, which is something I would find hard to achieve in a lot of other techniques. I have also drawn the King of Hearts using the pencil tool to give a more linear and hand drawn appearance, which I quite like as it's a lot more simple but contemporary because of the lack of colour, which works well I feel. I tried it with outlines hearts and filled in red hearts too, to see which worked best as I thought the filled red hearts may appear to colourful and contrasting against the black linear illustration, but I think ti works well as it highlights the suit of the card rather than just whether its a King, Queen or Jack, because of the contrast in colour.

Using the illustrations from above I fitted them into the actual card shape with the suit and class of card, in this case King of the outsides as well, as the card would be when finalised. With the rest of the detail on the cards aside from the illustration I think the design with the hand drawn illustration and the red hearts works best as the red hearts fits in with the outside suit and number being red, and I think if these weren't red then the whole design would be much too linear, and there wouldn't be any space for colour which I think is needed to bring spark to the design. 

Expanding on these designs I tried the outside detail being outlined in both black and red because the Hearts suit is red coloured, so this makes sense to create the illustrations in red as well, so that they fit in better with the colour of the suit. I tried this with completely linear designs and with the outside detail filled in red, to give more colour and depth to the design.

I then experimented with this with a different suit to see if it didn't just work with the one suit.

This is all three picture cards created in this hand drawn style with the same elements filled in with colour rather than just being outlines to give more substance to the design. The outside elements being filled in also helps to frame the illustrations as well, so they don't just look like they're floating around in the middle of the card, but anchored in place with this detail.

Using the second inspiration image as a major guideline I created the whole hearts suit and part of the queen suit, as my tutor said that I didn't need to create the whole pack of cards, just a selection as the practical part of this module isn't to produce perfect finished outcomes, it's more about the idea behind them, so as long as I show the idea effectively I shouldn't have to produce the whole pack of cards.

These are my picture card designs with the clipping mask photographs as the background images, As you can see I have tried to use photographs which aren't obviously sexy to show the women in an empowering and independent a light as possible, so that the quotes aren't affected by the way the women look. For some of the darker images I have made the text white and vice versa for the lighter images so that the text us always clear to read. I lowered the opacity down on the drop caps so that the drop caps weren't that clear but you could still tell what letterform it was so you could read the quote.

Close up of one of the playing cards.