Dinosaur Playing Cards

Dinosaur Playing cards Mockup 1

Overview

These playing cards are aimed at young dinosaur lovers looking to play their favorite card games with a prehistoric twist. Dinosaur playing cards took the shape in a carnivore vs. herbivore themed set where the traditional suites were replaced by carnivore, herbivore, plants, and meat.

Challenges

The most challenging part about this project was coming up with unique suites to replace the traditional hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds. I know I wanted to have a split of 2 suites being carnivore themed and 2 being herbivore themed

Research

I’m a lover of dinosaurs, so most of my research consisted of pulling reference images of prehistoric plants and creatures to come up with fun and engaging illustrations for the suits and face cards.

For the logo I wanted to Show this clear split of the carnivorous meat eaters and the herbivorous plant eaters. The split being on a rock fossil plate was to show that these cards are unearthed like the dinosaurs who once roamed the earth.

Dinosaur Playing cards sketch 1
Dinosaur Playing cards sketch 2
Dinosaur Playing cards Sketch 3
Dinosaur Playing cards Sketch 4
Dinosaur Playing cards SKetch 5

The Design

Dinosaur Playing cards Concepts

The split was always a prominent feature of the logo. When going through concepts I knew I wanted to display the carnivore side as sharp, aggressive and the herbivore slightly more rounded

Originally I had a tagline stating that the pack was herbivores and carnivores. However, that layout felt cluttered to me and it would often it hard to make the layout work with all that wording.

Colors

The orange and green were meant to loop back to the split idea. Green being more associated with the plant side being calm and mellow. On the flip side, the orange is warm and energetic, embodying the aggression of the carnivore side.

Dinosaur Playing cards Pallet

01 Primary

Dinosaur Playing cards Primary logo

02 Secondary

Dinosaur Playing cards Secondary Logo

Suits

The Idea I landed on for the suits was to have them be split between the dinosaurs themselves, and the food that they eat. So for carnivores I modeled the suit after a T-rex footprint and a piece of meat to go along side it. The herbivore suit has the footprint of a brachiosaurus and the plant suit is modeled after a prehistoric plant.

Dinosaur Playing cards card 1
Dinosaur Playing cards card 2
Playing card with brown border, number 4 in corners, and four green footprints on white background.
Playing card featuring a red dinosaur footprint as the suit, with the number 2 in the corners on a white background, bordered in brown.

Face Cards

For the face cards, I wanted to display the mightiest dinosaurs from both sides. For the King of the carnivores there was no contest for the T-rex being chosen. The Brachiosaurus was the candidate for the queen of herbivores because of its large stature. Both of these dinosaurs were chosen because of their iconic roles in the Jurassic park franchise.

It was very important to keep the split as clear as possible between the face cards. The T-rex is purposefully sharper in comparison to the Brachiosaurus because of their opposing sides as predator and prey

Closing Thoughts

Dinosaur Playing Cards was a revival of my childhood. Creating the cards to be fun and not too scientifically accurate set it apart from a lot of the more adult marketed competitors. The project itself allowed for a fun way to experiment with a different illustration style.