Card Design Inspiration from Package Design



My game inspiration comes from all sorts of stuff, but most often it comes from stumbling upon a cool image, illustration style, or graphic design. Package design in particular has a lot of similarities to card design. You have to maintain a consistent brand aesthetic across multiple instances, but still create enough diversity within that line to distinguish each individual product.

That's very similar to designing a deck of cards, making sure there are some consistent elements like typography, composition, contrast, art style, etc. But at the same time, each card must be different enough to avoid confusion in actual play. Much like card design, a good package design must double-code to make those differences clear to people with different visual abilities. Can the package/card be distinguished by color-blind buyers/players , for example.

It's all about Iterative Visuals. Start with one baseline, change one or two things, and always only change those one or two things for each iteration. Take a look at some of these packages and imagine what card game you could make featuring these design schemes. Above is one of my favorites: The Newman's Own organic mint line, designed by Terri Gosse and Kelly Pickering.

Designer: Taylor Goad / Source: Lovely Package


Designer: Pearlfisher / Source: Lovely Package


Designer: Caleb Heisey Design / Source: Lovely Package


Designer: One Darnley Road / Source: Lovely Package

Designer: R Design / Source: The Dieline


Designer: Big Fish / Source: The Dieline

Designer: Casey Sullivan / Source: Behance

Designer: Bluemarlin / Source: The Dieline

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

5 Graphic Design and Typography Tips for your Card Game

Image
Chris Farrell of Illuminating Games just wrote a thorough critique of card games setting their body text to be so small that they cannot be read at arm's length, let alone across the table. Here's an excerpt, but the whole thing is worth a read for any would-be card game designers out there. (Myself included.) Break out your copy of the base set of Dominion, and look at the Chapel. This has a text box roughly 3.5cm by 4.5cm. It's got a single line of text. That line of text is 1 (one) millimeter high. 1mm! For me, it's only clearly readable at half an arm's length even in the bright light of day. (...) Compare this to a more sane game like Glory to Rome, where the font size is 2-3 times as large (text is 2mm high, keywords 3mm and usually highlighted). I can generally read Glory to Rome cards across the table, and can certainly see the important keywords. To heap insult upon injury, not only does Glory to Rome have far more legible text than Dominion it also has...
Read more

Low-High Dice Game

Image
A dice game inspired by the stock market (and playing lots of Martian Dice). Roll a bunch of dice and choose which sets to keep. Choose your strategy wisely! Stuff You Need Two-to-Six PLAYERS A PENCIL and PAPER to keep score Thirteen standard six-sided DICE How to Play The shortest player takes the first turn. On your turn, first roll all thirteen dice. Several dice will have matching results. These are called SETS. (A single die result is a set, too.) You must choose a set to keep. For example, your first roll results are 111124445555 . The sets are four 1 s, one 2 , three 4 s, and four 5 s. After keeping a set of dice, lock them up in a row. This is called the GOOD TRACK. For example,  you could keep the set of four 1 s, one 2 , three 4 s, or four 5 s . You decide to keep the four 1 s and line them up in your good track. After keeping a set, you may end your turn or re-roll the remaining unlocked dice. When you re-roll, immediately set aside any results tha...
Read more

One Thing to Avoid in Game Design

Image
When game designer Paul Peterson was interviewed for the upcoming Titans Series of games from Calliope Games, there was one segment at 1:55 that really caught my attention (emphasis mine): "A couple years ago I was teaching people how to play Guillotine and I hadn't played in a while. The first thing I did was say, 'The first thing you gonna do when you open your game is you look through this deck and you take this card.' I pulled out the Callous Guards card and threw it over my shoulder. Everybody laughed. I said, ' That's the biggest mistake I ever made as a game designer in my life.'" Oof. Those are strong words. What's the big deal? For context, the game Guillotine is all about collecting the heads of French nobles during the revolution. There is only one guillotine, with a line of nobles waiting for their grim fate. On your turn, you play action cards to change the order of the line, then take the Noble card from the front of the ...
Read more