The beautiful Apothecary 2 Playing Cards are now LIVE on Kickstarter. Meticulously designed by Alex Chin of Seasons Playing Cards, both Verana Virtues, and Seronda Sentiment playing cards are based on the idea of capturing these invisible concepts like a feeling, or an idea, and then transforming them into very real items [First Look]. According to Alex,
There’s nothing like holding a physical, tangible item of some concept like an Insight, or a Virtue and then giving it to someone just to see their reactions. It’s probably one of my favorite decks because of this. People are caught off guard because they just don’t know what it is, but the packaging makes it look so real.
Because of the subject matter and the design prompt of making something quite literally out of nothing, Alex needed to explore new venues of printmaking to create a product that really stands out as an out of this world item. The results of upgrading and adding all these print techniques into these art packs truly elevated the level of design on these decks.
We asked Alex about the design process for Verana Virtues and Seronda Sentiments,
In terms of the design process sometimes it’s easier to follow up a collection because you have a basic framework of design. In this case, however (at least in terms of the back design) it ended up being more difficult than I had expected. The Verana Virtues was a pretty straightforward back design composition given that I had to implement the diamond shape into it, but because of the theme of summer, I ended up having to incorporate some sort of item that displayed a full bloom. This central flower arrangement on paper seemed easy at first, but once I realized that it needed to be a 2-way back design, it took several iterations to get it to look natural while still being legible both ways.
On the consistency of the design across all the packs, Alex said,
The Seronda Sentiments back is probably my favorite of the Apothecary line and literally took me the longest to design. Trying to come up with a unique composition that would compliment the other 3 packs in the collection was a nightmare using the heart since it resembles too much like a spade.
The iterations ended up looking too close to the other designs. Alex continued,
It was only until maybe my 100th go around that I discovered that I could split the heart to either end to get something new. I had to add a central element to it to really bind the two halves together but it worked out well. I call the design the Broken Heart.
If you like what you’ve read here and want to support the Apothecary 2 playing cards, you can find it on Kickstarter here. Pledge starts at $14 and both decks will be printed by the US Playing Card Co.
