Street Scopophobia

Project type: Illustration, Layout, Packaging
Timeframe: October 2021 - December 2021
Tools: Illustrator, Photoshop

Problem

In a world where Right-handed people dominate, you may not even notice where issues for Lefties could be. Playing cards are one of those places; they are designed for Righties, fanning out the cards using your left hand will leave you with a completely blank looking deck. Current Left-handed solutions either create problems for Righties, or make the faces of the cards very crowded and hard to read.

Solution

Create a Left-handed accessible deck of cards. This included a system to see each card pip when fanning to the left while keeping the original feel of playing cards. I also wanted to make every part of the playing cards custom because, for card collectors, when you open a new deck and find out that it’s only the back that is custom, it’s quite disappointing. So, everything needed to be custom made while making sure that it didn’t deviate too far from the standard setup to make sure they were still easy to tell each card apart from a glance.

Research

Full Lefty

One solution is the full lefty deck; moving all the pips to the other side of the card. But this solution only ends up flipping the problem onto right-handed people.

Double Pip

Duplicating the pips is currently the most common solution, however, it usually makes the higher numbers feel cramped. The 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10s fight for whitespace, while the court cards end up getting shrunk to make up for the extra pip.

Process

Moodboard

For this particular deck of cards, I chose to hone into this gritty, dark look. I wanted to have that suspicious feeling, like you’re being watched, or like you are about to be scammed or pickpocketed. From this moodboard I started thinking about paranoia, and phobias; that’s where Scopophobia came about, the fear of being watched.

Possible Solutions

I took the current pip in its normal layout and changed it to a horizontal layout. There were several iterations of this, and by printing a few cards out on paper and testing the pips at different sizes with users, I could better understand what size was the most legible and felt the most natural to the average card user.

Testing with users found that going half the height of the original pip made it the easiest to read. By doing this, the left pips will have a greater chance of being viewed during a fan, this also keeps the whitespace at a better level.

Spacing & Guides

However, when it came to higher value cards, like the 10s, everything ended up becoming too crowded. The solution was to make the main suits smaller and keep them contained further in the middle of the card.

By doing this, each card has much more whitespace for the eye to rest on and it gives this deck a little more uniqueness, since the standard deck keeps the suits much more spread out.

Suits

Each suit was custom made and created to mimic the typeface, Civane Condensed, that it pairs with. This makes sure that every “informational” part of the card feels cohesive. Equally as important, the standard Bicycle pips are well known and easily recognisable. By redesigning both the suits and typeface, it removes the “anticipatory disappointment” that card collectors feel when opening a new deck just to find out that it’s got standard faces.

Final Thoughts

Overall, this project’s workflow was very smooth! By far the hardest part of this project was the initial setup of the grid system. It was difficult finding the perfect balance and finding the extra space to accommodate larger letters and numbers that didn’t fit with the rest, like the “10’s and the K’s.” But, I ended up finishing the project with a tiny bit of time left, letting me add some fun little extra pieces that really brought everything together.

An eyeball was added to the face of every single card to make sure you are always reminded that you’re being watched, keeping the scopophobia at it’s max, even when not looking at the back design. There were also a few extra cards added into the deck for magicians to use: a double backer and a 2 ½ of Hearts. Each of these perfect for multiple kinds of reveals and tricks!