A deck of playing cards is one of those design challenges that looks deceptively simple. The mix of a handful of familiar shapes, symbols and rules would appear easy to work with, but once you start digging into the details, every decision matters. A card has to work upside down, across a table, in someone’s hand, and still tell a story in a space barely bigger than your palm.
For illustrator Pope Phoenix, and even before he considered using the best design software, in this case Affinity Designer, that challenge became the perfect way to explore the history, energy and visual language of hip-hop. Created from an open brief by Affinity to design a playing card deck that could eventually become a physical product, King of Spades takes the idea of a royal flush and rebuilds it around the four pillars of hip-hop: MCing, DJing, Breaking and Graffiti.
