Playing Card Deck

The Challenge

Diablo Media is a performance marketing agency with a yearly presence at industry conferences in Las Vegas. The easy call was licensing an existing deck and printing our logo on it. I talked us into the harder option: a fully custom illustrated playing card deck, designed from scratch, to give away at the booth and drop into employee holiday gift bags. Two months, solo, working within our existing brand illustration style.

The Solution

I started each face card in Procreate on the iPad, then moved into Illustrator to tighten everything up. The trickiest part was the face card construction (traditional playing cards read identically in both orientations, so each illustration had to stitch together when rotated 180°). There was no real system for it. I solved each one individually. Beyond the face cards, I designed the suit symbols at three separate scales: a tight version for card corners, a standard version for the card body, and a bigger ornamental version for the aces. The box got the same treatment.

The Results

At the show, people sought out our booth specifically to get their hands on one. The deck went into employee holiday gift bags at year end alongside other items. Diablo Media is known in the performance marketing space for doing swag well, and nobody was walking away disappointed.