Custom MakerGeek playing cards

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I have the best wife in the world. On this occasion her awesomeness is demonstrated through the medium of playing cards. A deck of cards designed by her just for me!

I am a fan of card games, and certainly enjoy the occasional game of poker with friends. So my wife decided to design me a deck from scratch, with a cog motif to represent my maker side. I love to make mechanisms, and the cog is definitely a  symbol I associate with. In fact this started at Christmas when she made me this cool t-shirt, yes she stenciled most of that qr code, and hand painted the rest. it really scans and takes you to this very website.

Having painstakingly designed 52 unique cards in inkscape, she then found a supplier that would print a short run of real physical decks, and a package containing 10 decks of my very own, completely bespoke cards arrived from hong kong this week. I’m still super excited about them, I have a deck at work and find my self idly shuffling them whilst waiting for things to compile 🙂

Here are a bunch of detailed images, you can see that the cog motif is in each of the pips, as well as in details of the picture cards. I really love that the heads of all the face cards are cogs.

Now I’m looking into the various card finishes I can get, these are nice little decks, but there are a bunch of options around depending on the amount of decks you’re ordering. The American Playing Card Association will print custom decks, but their website has a certain air of ‘if you have to ask how much, you can’t afford it’ I think their minimum run is 5000 decks. I’ve asked for a quote from a UK company called ivorygraphics.co.uk which seems to specialise in playing card decks with differing finishes, including one that is a little more like the linen finish of a bicycle deck. I guess I’m just over excited about having my very own deck designed for me, and now I want to see about getting it printed in different sizes/finishes so that I can have every day use cards along with special occasion cards. They’re so cool I was even wondering about making them available to buy.

And here is the creative genius her self showing off her creation: