Playing cards

One of the fun diversions I have had in my time was making playing cards. I did a whole chapter in my biography on this.

My playing card design site https://www.me.uk/cards allows you to make a wide variety of cards. It is a fun little system I set up long ago.

However it has come up lately for a few reasons.

For a start I made some cards for the pub, on Amazon. Please buy some.

But also some error reports I had - some edge cases made bad cards. And making the cards for the pub meant I wanted custom card backs which it did not allow.

So I have updated. New features...

• Fixed a bug making some size cards mess up court cards.
• Upload custom artwork (PDF) for backs.
• Upload custom artwork (PDF) for jokers.
• Maze and arrows backs are more random, each deck is different (obvious all cards the same back in each deck - but every deck we make is unique).
• Tidied the options to be clearer.
• Added an option for a second set of aces to be included.

The last point was one I pondered. We make some unique decks, with an "11", or a "0" or "1" card, which is unusual. But actually what may sell better is a deck with a second set of aces, to have, well, "up your sleeve". So why not.

I have added custom ace of spades now too.

Playing cards

Well, I am pleased to say we now have five packs of cards on Amazon. Sadly we don't have the Stargate cards yet, and I have a bad feeling that is going to finally hit a brick wall (more on that later).

Click on the pack for the Amazon page. Ideal Christmas present / stocking filler :-)



P.S. And yes, these are going for cost price, but if they are popular I'll buy in a larger quantity and get the price down.

A&A branded (with extra 11 card)
FireBrick branded (with extra 0 card)
RevK branded Left Handed deck
RevK branded Goodall & Son reproduction deck
RevK branded (well sort of) White Minimalist deck

All designed by me, see https://www.me.uk/cards for downloadable artwork for my card designs.

The RevK brand

I am far from retired, and may never be. There is a lot involved in running a company even if you have very good staff to handle a lot of the day to day work. However, I am trying to find more time for myself, and that does mean some times I come up with little projects of my own.

Historically, as a business, we have embraced many new things from laser engraving to 3D printing, and incorporated them in to the business. Indeed, these can be very useful - we use laser engraving on some FireBrick products and right now I am looking in to some 3D printing with flame retardant ABS for a related project. So they are not totally divorced from the main company activity. We are known for broadband, but have always been involved in a wide range of goods and services.

However, just occasionally, it is quite fun to try something completely different. Some times such things are commercial though.

Unfortunately it does not really make a huge amount of sense for me to set up a separate company and VAT and so on, unless I do come up with some more serious viable project. Obviously if I do, then that is a consideration. It also does not make a lot of sense for me to try a commercial project as myself, with the extra tax implications, and so on. So generally new projects that have any commercial prospect do go through the company, even if they are totally off the wall and unrelated to our main business. Obviously that means the business makes any profit from these ventures, and also, obviously, such projects need to be low risk and/or profitable.

So the plan is to make use of my personal brand, "RevK", for which I have a registered trade mark, and the business will sell some RevK branded stuff from time to time.

You may already see that we have RevK reproduction playing cards listed on Amazon.

My latest side quest, as you will have noticed, is these Stargate related playing cards. The good news is MGM are finally talking to me. The bad news is how much they want up front in royalties. The amount per pack of cards is not crazy though. However, we are talking, and it may actually happen. It is a nice change for me to do something creative and fun. So watch this space for possible new RevK branded stuff.

The Real World

I finally had them printed! Just 2 decks for my own use, but they have come out just as I expected.

It will be fun playing with these on my next holiday.

Basically, it is a normal 52 card deck, but with Alteran characters for the indices, plus 8 "jokers" that are the gate address from Atlantis as dialled from Earth.

I'd love to sell them, but I am waiting for MGM to confirm if any licensing is needed (if so, I doubt it would be viable). I have not used clips or stills from the films or series, just the gate and glyphs from wikimedia commons (with a credit). I think I understand correctly that this CC licence allows commercial use like this.

The inspiration for the jokers is, of course, series 3, episode 6, of Atlantis "The Real World" where Dr. Elizabeth Weir has been invaded by nanites and thinks she is back on Earth in a mental hospital.

She deals a game of patience (solitaire) but the face up cards are the gate address for Atlantis from Earth (with two glyphs swapped for no apparent reason). It is a classic scene, and one that can now be reproduced with these cards:-

A RevK GiveAway

[Update: We have given away hundreds of packs of cards, so I have stopped for now. Thanks for the interest - I am amazed how many requests in just two days]
[Update: Now available to buy on Amazon]

Having spent so much time on these playing cards (drawing the court cards and making code, etc), I decided to have some actual decks printed - a Reproduction 19th Century Goodall & Son deck, printed on modern playing card board. Ivory Graphics have done a good job...

The lack of index in the corner means they are fine for games with cards on the table, but not really that good for when you have a hand of cards. The original deck was 32 cards (no 2 to 6) but these are a full 52 card deck.

They are something unusual to impress your friends and family, and I have decided to give away some to my blog readers.

Just follow this link to request a pack: www.me.uk/cards/ordercard.cgi
(name/address just used for the postage, honest)

Obviously subject to availability, but do have fun and comment here or tweet...
[And yes, I am personally paying for these decks and postage which A&A is handling for me]

The card designs are here...

Playing cards getting out of hand now

It has to be said that when I get started on some project (or "side quest") I do tend to get a tad carried away, and playing cards is no different. The card printing company asked if I wanted a job! We have printed samples and some quantity runs of half a dozen types of deck so far.

First off, the card making system that allows you to pick from hundreds of thousands of different decks (here) has been extended somewhat already. See below.

If anyone wants to have these card designs printed, I'd recommend Ivory Graphics. My customising site can produce print ready artwork and instructions on ordering. I have to say the quality of printing is pretty damn good.

I took a close up of the King of Diamonds, and blew it up and still it is hard to see the dots on the print screen. I have no idea what resolution this is, but it is really quite impressive.

It totally justifies making vector based artwork for the cards in the first place.

So, the recently added options are :-

Super size indices

A relatively simple change was to make the indices larger, but obviously that meant making the pips and court card images smaller to fit. They look nicer with a box round the pips as well.

Grey clubs/diamonds

I did not know this was a thing, but apparently it is. The Clubs and Diamond being greyed out, presumably to avoid mistakes. Easy enough to do.

Symmetric pips

I have seen this done in various ways. It always bugged me that cards are not symmetric layout of pips (e.g. the 7) let along symmetric pips where possible (e.g. the 6). But obviously cards with odd numbers of pips need something special for the odd one. What I have done is cut the pip and have a jagged line between the two halves. Initially I did not do for diamonds as not necessary, but they looked out of place.

What was also fun was how to mix with "All pips same way up", which I decided to make all the pips the combined up/down version - looks weird!

Duplimate barcodes

This was totally new to me - I played bridge a bit in school but I had no idea that bridge clubs don't just shuffle a deck and deal!

What they do is deal the deck on computer in advance and then have a machine deal out the hands. This means you can all play the same hand over several games meaning nobody has the luck of the deal as a reason for winning!

I am amazed, to be honest. But this is apparently a big thing and has been for a long time. Long enough for the patent to be running out in 1½ years or so. For now, to my surprise, I find that we can simply buy a licence for €0.10 per deck which is cheap enough to do things properly if we ever sponsor a bridge club.

Alternative backs

Initially I did a simple diamond pattern back, but I also played around with a marked back using position of little triangles. However, I actually liked the back design so have made a static (non marked) symmetric version of the back - it will be on the next packs of A&A cards.

Amazingly we have given away well over 100 packs of cards now. More coming next week.

Four colour deck

Another of the I never knew this was a thing cases, a four colour deck. Again, pretty easy option, though I did have to work out interactions with other features like "ghost deck".

Alteran index characters

Obviously I have been watching too much Stargate, as I also added Alteran (Ancient) character indices as an option.

Print ready artwork

As I've been working with Ivory Graphics and they seem like good guys, I have also made it so the form allows you to prepare complete print ready artwork for a whole deck. It takes a while to make so gets emailed, but includes instructions on how to order real cards!

Boxes

The initial decks we got were simply packed in a cello wrapper with gold tear out strip. However, I decided to give it a go designing a box, and it turns out to be quite easy. They have a template as PDF which inkscape can simply import and I can simply save as a PDF to send back to them. They look really good!

Other cards

I was quite intrigued by some of the other packs of cards from Europe. Many of the cards I had been playing with were US based and had different styles of court cards, but these cards I looked at are clearly based on the very same original designs. But there are occasional minor differences, apart from obviously that they have been redrawn.

I was also surprised to see commercial cards that were badly done like this Queen of Spades with the pip over the crown! Even so,  and ignoring for a moment that the older cards were mirrored images for six of the court cards, the same features exist in the detail of the card.

I could never be an artist!

Well, for a start I got a "D" in O-Level Art, but apart from that I am not sure I could cope with the whole concept of being an artist. At least I took Art!

In some ways coding is art, sort of, and I can be fussy, and even re-write my code from scratch because I am unhappy with it.

But art is hard - I did a really simple job last week - I drew some playing cards (copied them to be honest), and as above, I did that twice. But at the end of the day, every time I look at what I have done I find myself saying it is not "perfect" and not "finished" yet. They can never be "exact copies" as the originals were mis-aligned and badly printed and badly drawn, so I am guessing at what they "should" have been, and that is where "art" comes in.

I have tinkered with the exact placement and size of the pips on the cards, and then on the court cards. I have tried to make logical "rules" and then found they do not look "right". It is not simple.

I made the mistake of making an interactive card options picker, which showed a load of combinations that did not quite work. So I fixed that in the code. I think all combinations should now "work" even if a bit odd.

I have now got bogged down in the design of a box for the cards, and whether we can make the artwork CMYK so the printers do not have to convert it.

This is very much a "side quest" (as my lawyer described it), but has got me hooked on getting things "right". The problem, I think, is that unlike code, you cannot ever say it is "right". Code can be right in that for all cases it has to handle it works correctly to the design. Art can never actually be "right" as the "design" is not fixed. That is driving me nuts!

I have to put it down, as there is much "real work" to do, but my position in the company does afford me a lot of "side quest" leeway, which is nice. Even so, there have to be limits. The real test is probably the point at which some "side quest" becomes so much "work" it ends up on an R&D tax claim, but I doubt this would qualify, just yet.

Anyway, the existing limited edition packs are proving popular, just email the A&A sales team fill in this form if you want a pack from the first batch for free. I may then have them on the site for sale, and a few variations, not sure yet. Daft thing is I only play cards when my mates are round, and that is pretty much only when on holiday, so not very often.

P.S. pre-empting comments from mates - OK "piss artist" I could manage!

Promotional playing cards

Well, the folks at Ivory Graphics seem to have done a good job, and I finally have 200 decks of playing cards to give away.

These are somewhat limited edition - being the first attempt at drawing the court cards, and with a Jack that has the wrong coloured hat... I doubt that will make them valuable, but who knows, in 150 years :-) Ask the sales guys at A&A nicely and they'll send you one...

The designs are also on my web site - with options to allow you to make about 20,000 variations, released under Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain licence. Enjoy.

www.me.uk/cards

P.S. I have even included an interactive picker for the different decks and yet more options...

SVG Vector Playing Cards

I decided to make some SVG playing cards, well, for fun. Scalable Vector Graphics is excellent for such things and works with all major browsers.

Chris Aguilar's
Queen of Spades

But first I googled, and found someone had already done it! In fact quite a few people have - with perhaps one of the best examples done by Chris Aguilar (here). There is even a rather good set of Javascript functions which work with his cards (here). Wikipedia also have an impressive set of SVG playing cards of various styles (here). People do like their playing cards, don't they!

Well, to be frank, I was almost put off. Chris Aguilar has done an excellent job, I am impressed. Well, everyone doing this has done a stunning job to be honest. But that did not quite stop me in my tracks (those that know me will not be surprised). It would be a fun exercise to do this, but really only if I can do a better (or at least different) job in at least some aspect. To be fair, that was going to be hard. From an artistic point of view, Chris Aguilar has done an excellent job as had others, and I am not really an artist, so I concentrated on the technical aspects mostly. Even so, this turned in to a week long project and a lot of work just for a bit of fun...

This is what I came up with - enjoy...

www.me.uk/cards/

How are things better and/or different?

Licence

One of the simplest improvements I can make is releasing my cards under a completely open Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain licence, not even requiring attribution. This makes them much easier to use. Whilst I'd like credit, obviously, and it would be appreciated if the link on the Ace of Spades was left intact, that is not a requirement. Do what you like with them.

Compact SVG

The first thing I noticed was that Chris used inkscape. This is an excellent choice, and it is pretty much the editor for SVG. It also does a good job tracing scanned images. However SVG has a lot of bloat. Making a ten of clubs resulted in a file that was 29k. One I picked on wikipedia was 33k. By making the SVG myself, not using inkscape I was able to make use of symbol objects, so only drawing the club once, then using it 12 times for example. My SVG is probably not quite as compact as I would like, but my ten of clubs is only 1.7k, so much leaner.

My 10 of Clubs

Hand crafted paths

The other thing I could do to save space was to hand craft some of the SVG, making the pips (suit symbols) and digits/letters (value symbols) from scratch. The actual shape of these has varied over time, and this allowed me to add my own subtle variation on a theme. It ensured the pips were symmetric and took less space. I am quite pleased with the result.

Separate files

One slightly odd thing about Chris's work is that he has made one large SVG image for the whole deck. I decided to make separate files for each card and a zip of them per deck. I am not sure why he did that to be honest, as he says, you can export them from the SVG he has made, but that is a tedious task, 54 times, so seems unnecessary. Wikipedia has separate files.

Court cards

The court cards are an issue. All the rest can easily be made and done so programatically, but the court cards are art! I am not an artist even if I did take O-Level art. So I had basically three choices.

• I could use Chris's court cards, or someone else's. This is somewhat admitting defeat, and obviously I would credit him, and it would limit the licence by which I could publish.
• I could design and draw my own - except, as I say, I am not an artist.
• I could scan / trace / copy / draw from some actual court cards.

Antique (c.1870) Goodall & Son piquet deck

One possible issue here is one of copyright. Chris has copyright in the work he has done. Every time someone makes a design, or photograph or scan, they create a new copyright. Notably he says he has used very old designs that are out of copyright, but I noted different card manufacturers seem to have subtly different court cards and his look identical to Bicycle playing cards, but he may well have found an out of copyright original from which to make his design. My solution was to obtain some actual antique playing cards (Goodall & Son, c. 1870), so old they do not even have numbers on the cards (you have to count the pips!) but they have nice court cards and they are too old to be in copyright any more. They are thick board, square corners, badly aligned printing, and this was a Piquet pack (so no 2 to 6 cards), but the court cards were fine.

Trace of Goodall & Son
Ace of Spades
(dates to 1867-97)

I could have just used inkscape image trace, but that does not fit with the neat and compact SVGs I had done so far, and the originals are not that good, so I used inkscape to carefully manually trace the court cards creating my own new designs. Time consuming, and like most artistic projects I find you can spend forever on the fine detail. In fact, I think I have found a bigger time-suck than even 3D printing - it took over three days solidly working on these, and even then I went back to tweak a couple of cards once I got reasonably good at it.

What really bugged me is that the designs should be symmetric, in theory, but these cards are not only badly aligned print of each colour but badly drawn in the first place, so I had to be a tad artistic in places. I was drawing only half the card but kept having to preview with the 180 degree rotation to confirm things lined up with the other half. It even turned out one card was designed to not be symmetric, so I improvised, the Jack of Heats actually had a heart dead centre, so had a "way up", so I did two hearts side by side instead.

History

There is one thing that is noticeable though - modern court cards (at least English decks) all face in a standard way. It is a total mess, i.e. there are four ways they face (profile left, half left, half right, profile right) but each suit does not have all four versions. The deck I used as reference is old, and so six of the court cards actually face a different way to modern cards - it makes them that bit different.

Some of the history is interesting - it seems in the 19th Century Goodall & Son and De La Rue were cornering the market in playing cards, merging in to De La Rue in the 1920s, and going on from making playing cards to now making bank cards. I never knew bank cards had a history in playing cards!

My Queen of Spades

Coding

I did not simply make a deck of SVG cards - that is not quite my style - what I made was a C programme that creates a deck of cards. It has lots of options (see below). It is fun working out the different ways you can make cards, and some of the subtle detail - for example, the 9 of clubs needs the centre club to be slightly higher than central to avoid clashing with the clubs on the sides! Of course the SVG was made using an XML library in the code.

Then I made more C code, this time to allow me to edit and tinker with the court card drawings in SVG, and extract the raw paths to make the include file for the main C code.

Size

The design allows me to make other sizes easily but I decided to stick to standard poker deck size (2.5" by 3.5") or the metric version (63mm by 88mm). Obviously as SVGs this is pretty academic as it is scalable.

Ghost pack is confusing

Variations

The C code, which I may yet publish, has a number of options which I can use in any combination. I have published a selection of decks made using some of these.

• Ghost - all black except the small pips under the value which are red for hearts and diamonds - inspired by a Bicycle Ghost deck. No, I have not done a black ghost deck (yet).
• Blue - Blue instead of red!
• Plain - Court cards and joker are simple letters, making the deck much smaller SVG.
• Box - A box is present around the court card artwork anyway, but this adds a box around all of the other cards, with a cream background
• Ace of Spades - This is normally "special", dating back to showing tax was paid (apparently) but can be made simple, just one standard size spade pip in the middle. Custom text/URL under the ace as well.
• No-Left - Not showing the index value and suit on the top left - so old school where you had to count the pipes
• Right - Also showing the index value and suit on the top right, for left handed players!
• No-Flip - Not inverting the pips on the bottom of the cards - like really old packs
• Old - using old style pips from the 1870 deck - they look quite different to what we see these days - typically used with no-left and no-flip to give the authentic style
• Eleven - Add an "eleven" card for extra fun - it comes between 10 and Jack.
• And of course options for artwork with no border/outline, and with bleed area for printing, and different sizes (bridge, poker, etc).

[update] Several more options including symmetric pips and 4 colour decks, etc, as well as making print ready artwork to order real packs.

I addition, I can make custom backs, and jokers and so on for different decks.

My 11 of Clubs

Going up to 11

Obviously I have made a pack with 11s in it (between 10 and Jack). Adding an 11 seemed obvious and for some games it will be simple as the order of cards is what matters (it is clearly ... 9, 10, 11, J, Q, K). So anything based on whist is no problem. Where it gets more complex is where the cards have scores, e.g. J, Q, K count as 10 and A counts as 1 or 11. Well, should the court cards now be 11? Should the A only count as 1 now? You'd have to make your own rules. I have not found much about using 14 card suits with my googling, but have found other SVG cards for 11s, so not original by any means.

Printing

I added options to add 3mm bleed area, and no card border/outline, to make it easy to make print ready graphics. An inkscape command line easily turns the SVGs in to PDFs. I had to design in clip paths for my court cards as web browsers limit the symbol to the viewBox, but sadly inkscape seems not to do that, so "bleed" from my court card designs were showing.

I found a company that seems to know what they are doing when it comes to printing playing cards, Ivory Graphics.

One thing that did puzzle me is their print tolerances. They want 3mm bleed around the card and 5mm clearance inside. This makes no sense as surely if they can be more than 3mm off on the card cutting they will be beyond the bleed, so why expect 5mm clearance not 3mm? Anyway, they were happy to try with 3mm clearance, which fits with actual playing cards I have checked. The big issue is that even 1 or 2mm may be enough to make an asymmetric back image which can be exploited, so a serious playing card printing company has to be pretty damn good and way better than 3mm...

The other thing is the way they work - and I suspect it is just common for companies to work like this. They have a pretty slick ordering system - you ask for a quote with all the options very clearly laid out, and then send one, and you click a link to order. You upload artwork (PDF files, nice). They have artwork templates and rules, so pretty simple. Now, if I was doing it, I would allow you to arrange which artwork is front and which is back of each card and the arrange the order of the cards, but no, it just lets you upload a load of files (and only one at a time, when I know browsers can handle more than one at a time if you try). You have to give them separate instructions for how the artwork is to be used, and even then they don't necessarily follow the instructions. Then produce a "proof" which is again PDFs but one for each front and back of each card with the card outline. This process seems to take a couple of days and be somewhat manual their end. I would have made it part of the ordering system showing the "proof" there and then, and hence bypassing some manual process and removing a two or three day delay in the process. However, with all of this, they do have good expectation management saying they take 6 days - I am impatient and finding inefficiency a tad annoying. That said, they were interested in the suggestion for improvements and said they are always trying to improve.

Email was a challenge - their system did not "like" that I had ivorygraphics in the email address I gave them, and my system flagged all their emails as spam so I had to go hunting for them!

The real proof is seeing the test pack of cards.

The test pack of an A&A deck

The verdict - well the cards are good, they look and feel the same as a "real" pack of cards, but the cutting was not perfect on all cards. I have changed the design slightly for printing to have a bigger margin to avoid this being such an issue - this was a "test pack" after all. The printers have also said they were not happy with the cutting and are doing a new test pack for me now.

P.S. Having the test pack has actually allowed me to make a number of minor changes to the designs, not just margins so that print tolerance issues won't show, but also really subtle things like miter-limit on the top of the digit "4" and other details that seem more obvious looking at the actual pack.