CRUSH AND CREATE

tl;dr: a fun day with very nice people, awesome projects and great feedback. Thanks for organizing, Axel and Attraktor. This project is about art and documentation, but also about designing a product that is available at a bearable price.

The gallery is up and includes Booster Pack A and the card for the Maker Meeting. The whole site has been updated with new pictures of the beta release. And there is a FAQ now.

Superweird to launch a thing you made like this. I hadn’t really thought about that before. Actually, there are a lot more things I hadn’t thought about before.

For example, as a designer, I enjoy making stuff reproducable. Optimizing the little process there is. Doesn’t matter if it will ever sell quantities (hint: 99.99% of all things ever made didin’t). It doesn’t just need to come out perfect, it needs to be made without stressing me, without doing unnecessary work or wasting time or other resources.

I am not happy with the cutting of the cards, for example, though they were cut by a really great guy in the best copyshop I know. I want at least the front side being perfectly cut. So do I start also doing the cutting myself? Learning how to use a big cutting machine (the smaller problem) and getting access to one (the larger problem)? Or cutting them with a cutter by hand, sheet by sheet?

These packs do take a very long time to make already:

• write emails to ask for permission and and details, research missing stuff
• finding working photos
• doing the illustrations
• making the card layouts and setting the info
• export sheets
• print (needs double time because at the current 280 grams paper, automatic duplex is not supported)
• cut cards out of the sheets like a surgeon
• sort into packs
• print, cut and fold the paper bags
• put cards in and do sealing finish

Phew. Kinda beyond any price tag which would make sense. But back to making: I have to find balance between “integrity” and “ship it, damnit.”

For example, in the prototypes I had also drawn the black border around the illustration on the front.

Looks superawesome. Turns out, the coloring needs to be kept inside the border so I wouldn’t need to do any background removing in Photoshop. Makes it so much slower to have to be careful with the background. So I changed that and do the masking in the Illustrator template. Using filters or repeating the same borders on different cards are no options.

With the prototypes I had also tried out to cut the original drawings of the items and actually gluing them on the background sheets. But for framing it is much more convienent to have background and item scanned seperately. Which means two scans instead of one. A problem, if you want to do 20 cards at once. Much less with seven. And I guess the next step would ideally be do one per day. Well.

One of the great findings of today was meinspiel.de, where I can order prototypes of whole decks with an industrial grade finish. The “International Poker” cards have nearly the same dimensions as my current design (63x88mm vs 62x88mm) which I take as a sign to follow that path.

All in all today felt like a very warm welcome and I’d like to thank everybody for the good time.

Stay tuned and see you soon, eg at Retune Berlin!

—Fabian