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A Game of Cards

The history of playing cards is a graphic design history. Over more than a thousand years, these two-dimensional designs, combining imagery and typography, have responded to cultural, political, economic, and technological changes and adapted to support card players. My Masters thesis, A Game of Cards, suggests that we can use playing cards as a model for graphic design historiography.

The project, which included an exhibition in April of 2025, was both a microhistory of playing cards and a deck of cards about that history.

Deliverables:

Metahistorical “Bread, Jam, & Flower” playing cards
Visual identity and package design for the Bread, Jam, & Flower playing card company
Exhibition design and installation
Documentary thesis book

The Bread, Jam, and Flower Deck of Cards

The Bread, Jam & Flower (rhymes with “Ben-jam-in Lauer”) deck is inspired by the evolution of playing cards. The deck especially from the earliest English decks of cards and seeks to restore some of the strangeness of medieval and early modern cards. By representing the story of playing cards graphically, A Game of Cards makes it easier to see the long and curious history that placed these designs on our card tables.

Technology Medieval card makers applied color to their cards with stencils. To print 120 supersized card backs for my exhibition, I used a Risograph printer, which reproduces images by forcing ink through stencils: a fast and low-cost modern version of early card-making methods.

Illustration The Bread, Jam, and Flower deck’s illustrations are inspired by early English cards, like this 1750 jack of spades (right). My goal was to restore some of the strangeness and whimsy of these early playing cards.

Research Aces of spades are often the most ornate card in any deck, because they’re inspired by 18th-century British duty stamps. My deck includes a shout-out to convicted stamp-forgers and tax dodgers Richard Harding and Henry Wheeler.

Typography Playing cards used to have a lot more words on them. The Bread, Jam, and Flower deck’s typographic approach is inspired by designs like Naipes Heraclio Fournier’s late 19th-century Castilian pattern.

Playing Cards and Graphic Design History

To complete my thesis, I wrote and designed Playing Cards and Graphic Design History, which suggests ways to examine the history of design by looking at the evolution of modern playing cards.

I wanted to give readers a way to discover the history of playing cards without bogging them down in repeated footnotes and historical allusions. So, I imagined an article that Edward Frederick Bread, a co-founder of the Bread, Jam, & Flower Playing Card Company, published in the fictional Mid-Atlantic Journal of Print Culture in 1992. I wrote the article and laid it out over four spreads in the “journal,” which I then Photoshopped onto my kitchen table surrounded by decks of cards, poker chips, and poker-game detritus like Cheez-It crumbs.

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