Specimen Book Playing Cards
Japanese Fairy Tale Theme
The project was to create a specimen book on a deck of cards, promoting 4 typefaces from a type foundry, and featuring sizes, texture, legibility, readability, and how they work in headlines and paragraphs. The deck follows the storyline of Japanese Fairy Tales, separated into 4 categories for each suit, and a typeface was used in the designs of storytelling for each category.
I chose to use 4 typefaces by Santiago Orozco from Typemade. Antic Didone for diamonds featuring Japanese culture talks, Dorsa for clubs featuring the mythical creatures, Italiana for hearts featuring the magical elves, and Clark Hairline for spades featuring the legendary beasts.
All 13 cards in each suit are designed in a system to feature the distinct, terminology, information, and comparisons between the 4 typefaces, as well as how they look in headlines, paragraphs, on a solid color background, being used in designs, and type as image. Illustrations are drawn for each suit to tell the story for different categories to make learning the typefaces more interesting even for people from a non-design related background.
Art direction: Gracy Liu
Design: Gracy Liu
Illustration: Gracy Liu
Savannah College of Art and Design
