In this series of posts, I walk you through how to create your own custom playing cards for your game designs. This is part two and is about coming up with the visual designs. Part one is about the initial preparations. Part three is the final touches and ordering a deck. The end result is a deck of high quality custom designed playing cards for your very own game.
Part two: Coming up with a design
Now it’s time to create the visual designs for card fronts and backs. Your game may have different series or types of cards. Holmgang has three kind of cards: The Saxons cards, the Angles cards and duel cards. Each of these will have their own visual design for the front sides. I want the back sides to be similar but also distinct.
You need to come up with a basic idea for the design. Sometimes it is obvious, sometimes it requires a little processing. Look at cards in other games and see what you like. Look at images and other visual elements in your game like the game board. Grab images from the internet for inspiration and include them as layers. Play around with different graphical elements, colours, fonts, and placement of these elements until you find something that works.
Stealing images finding inspiration
I do image searches on the internet to get inspiration for colours and visual elements. An advantage of creating games with a historical theme is that you can often find illustrations that are in public domain. These are rarely available in high resolution or colour though. So I also search for images with Creative Commons licenses and copyrighted images. For icons you hit both free and commercial sites.
If it’s just for inspiration or if it is for a hobby project, you can grab any picture from the internet. For commercial games or something you will publish to a wider audience, you need to be on top of copyright and licenses. Though if your game later gets to this stage, you can pay an artist to create the illustrations and icons you need when it is time to publish and use placeholder graphics for the first iteration.
For the front page for The City I found a great collage of overlapping gears in brown and pale yellow tones. I traced the image to an artist on Deviant Art. The artist generously grants permission to use it for non commercial applications as long as you credit the image. For Gotlandia I commissioned Claudia Cangini to create a front cover and used the colours and elements from there in the visual design of the game board and the cards.
I don’t use an AI image generator. Maybe I will one day. I still think that much AI art looks weirdly fake. It does composition well but the colours are so bright and artificial. If I one day create a game with that aesthetic, I might use AI.
The design for Holmgang
Holmgang is about a duel on an island in the river Eider in what is today Northern Germany. For the game board I had researched the Eider on Google Maps. Today the Eider is a narrow river that winds its way through lush green fields. So I used a very dark greenish blue for the river and a rich green for the island. To get high contrast against the blue and green, I used a pale golden yellow for the text and the spaces where the fighters move around.
A first shot at the card backs is to use the game board. But I had an idea to use Scandinavian style ornaments such as from the Jelling Stones not far north of the Eider. These patterns would give the game good vibe and a clear visual identity. I found good recreations of different styles and ended up with three that I liked. I scaled them to a good size, removed the black background and changed the colour to the light golden yellow I had already used for the text. On top of a dark blue background, they really spark!
Break up large areas with textures
One way to break up large areas of one colour is to use a texture. My favourite is parchment. I found a high resolution image that I reuse for most of my designs. I like it as it is brighter in the centre and darker in the corners but with lots of variation. You can rotate, scale and change colour to
For instance, I used it for the water in the Gotlandia game board. Go to Colours/Hue-Chroma and slide Hue, Chroma, and Lightness left and right to get exactly what you need. I used the same texture for the card backs for Holmgang, this time dialling it to a very dark greenish blue.
One file per card series and one layer group per card
Once I have an idea for a visual design that I’m happy with, I create a file for the design and clean up the layers I don’t need. I add layer groups for each card in the series. This way it is easy to flip through the different cards and make sure they use the same fonts. colours, and backgrounds layers. Make sure that the first cards you design in detail are those with most text and most graphical elements. This way you will not have surprises and rework when you later fill in details for all cards.
For Holmgang I end up with four files: One for the three back sides, and one each for the Saxons, the Angles, and the duel cards front sides.
Duel cards
Next I wanted to come up with a design for front of the duel cards. The 20 duel cards are the actions that the players choose for their fighters. Players choose one or two cards each simultaneously and then reveal and resolve in order with certain restrictions on which cards you can play together. The print-and-play version used a sentence at the bottom to state which cards can be played together. The order in which events are resolved is printed on the game board.
After not being too satisfied with this approach, I came up with the idea to list all the cards in order along the left side of the cards and then indicate in the list which cards it can be played with. This worked great!
Fonts
When selecting a font for the text on the cards, I prefer readability over decoration. Game cards are function-first designs. Pick a font that is easy to read, choose a good text size and a good line spacing. Print a card sample on paper to check. Check also that the font has the range you need, some fonts don’t have language-specific letters like the Danish ‘æ’. It’s also nice with a font where you have both medium and semi-bold. Bold is so brutal.
The font for card titles can be more fancy but don’t get carried away. Use two max three different fonts across all card fronts and backs. Unless of course you know what you are doing and do something like MÖRK BORG.
For Holmgang I decided on Lucida for the card text with a font size of 40 and a line spacing of 15. For the card titles I used Gurmukhi which is extremely minimalistic. For a very brief moment I considered using Futhark runes.
Colours
Fronts should be light and backs should be dark. You need a good contrast for reading text so that leaves white, grey, and yellow for the text heavy areas on the card fronts.
I chose light blue for the background for the action list. Actions are generally blue, and blue is contrast colour to the yellow area with the card effect. To pick the exact colour, I sampled a pixel from the greenish-blue card back and dialled up the lightness until I had a good contrast with the text.
To make the card title stand out, I inverted the colours and went for light golden yellow text on black. Black goes with anything.
Stretch and squeeze with kernel
After filling in the text on the 20 duel cards, I adjusted kernel to stretch and squeeze text to fill the space available. Kernel is extra space between letters. Card titles stand out with more spacing while squeezing a word can save you a line break and a trailing word.
The end result is 20 elegant and super readable duel cards. I'm uncertain if the plusses at the end of the words in the list of actions communicate well. This I will learn in later playtesting.
Continue to Part three: Final touches to learn how I created the designs for the Saxon and Angles cards and how to order.