Harry Wyatt, a New York City-based graphic designer, has designed a deck of playing cards that is about playing cards; in particular, it is about the suits. Wyatt says that clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades have been around for a long time (at least 600 or 700 years) and he wanted to use the symbols as the basis for the card graphics. He designed graphics for the jacks, queens, kings and aces for each suit, and based the graphics for each card on the elements of the symbol for the suit that the card belongs to. (For example, the graphic for the queen of hearts employs components of the heart symbol.)

Wyatt says that he got the idea during a workshop where he designed a few face cards for the diamond suit of a deck and while he and his colleagues were exchanging comments and suggestions, someone said “You know, a couple of those cards have an interesting diamond-ish look; what about doing something similar with the others?” He says that this suggestion stuck with him and he began thinking about the possibility of designing an entire deck in the same way. One of the questions that occurred to him along the way was:  “Has this been done before?” He went searching and was unable to find a deck designed along those lines. Of course, there are a lot of decks in the world, but he says that at least there doesn’t seem to be a well-known design of the sort he had in mind.

What drew him to the suit symbols?  He says that he thinks they have graceful forms, and he thinks that’s one reason why they have been around so long.

Does he play a lot of cards?  Wyatt says he does not play a great deal nowadays, but that he has played nearly all his life, beginning with War and being taught by his brothers to play “52 Pickup.” He has also played with cards by way of building houses and sailing them into wastebaskets or hats, and he says he finds something friendly about playing cards.

Were the cards drawn, painted, or created digitally?  “All of the above.  I began with pencil sketches, rendered some of the designs in gouache, and moved them into digital form to make them suitable for printing by the United States Playing Card Company.” In an effort to keep the feeling of hand-made graphics, he says he hand-painted textures for each of the face cards and aces and incorporated the textures into the graphics he hopes to have printed. Wyatt refers to cards designed by abstract artist Sonia Delaunay in the mid-twentieth century as being an influence in his design. “I loved the free feeling of her cards and hoped to have some of that feeling in mine.”

Are there other noteworthy features of the deck?  Wyatt says that he designed a special graphic for the “tuck” — the little tuck-in box in which a deck is packaged. On his tuck, he created a loose free-form plaid that wraps continuously around all of the edges and corners of the tuck. “That would be easy enough with a rectangular plaid,” he says, “but it was challenging with a relaxed free-form plaid that was set on a diagonal.”

Where did he get the name for the deck?  “Well, clearly I had the suits in mind. I thought of calling them “Well-Suited Playing Cards,” but the title got too bulky. I suppose I was playing with the words a little and I came up with the label for the tuck: ‘A Sufficient Number of SUITABLE PLAYING CARDS to Play a Game or Build a House.”

Wyatt is currently trying to fund production of Suitable Playing Cards by means of Kickstarter.