What designing computer science cards taught me about graphic design
fhoehl.com30 points by marukodo 4 hours ago
30 points by marukodo 4 hours ago
These look really nice and I love the idea.
Does anyone have a resource for something like this but under a libre/free license?
Seems like "Oblique Strategies" cards by Eno and Schmidt but also like flash cards for revision. They look nice.
Love this, and immediately wanted a couple of copies for friends + office. Tried ordering from the US and could not increase the shopping cart quantity from 0 in Chrome or Safari.
This is a very interesting deck! And I really appreciated the description of the design process.
Assuming user marukodo is the creator of these cards, could you contact me offline? (email is in my profile) I've got some questions.
> offline
???
‘Offline’ now gets used to mean ‘asynchronously’.
(I remember when computer science cards were 7⅜″×3¼″)
I remember when online used to mean the I/O device is listening to the cable that's connected.
(So in a way, email could be used offline with IPoAC.)
Indeed, I did get email over UUCP in '90s, so I read and wrote offline. Worth considering again, if I can find a next hop again.
I was hoping they'd go into how the got the cards actually printed?
According to the store page, the cards were printed and bound in China. There are a lot of different card manufacturers there.
For very small runs of 1-10 decks, I've used places like makeplayingcards.com. The cards are print-on-demand quality, but far better than printing at home on cardstock. (My preferred home printing method for prototyping is to use custom labels and cheap Magic the Gathering bulk commons.)
We did a card game that was printed by Panda Game Manufacturing in China. Since we did about 5k units, they used traditional offset printing on 300gsm blackcore (similar stock to Magic the Gathering). But the minimum order quantity is 500 or 1000 units. Costs per deck were vastly cheaper than the print-on-demand decks.
There is a company in Florida called ShuffledInk that will do custom cards. I've used them for a 50 deck order. Cards were more expensive, but did save a little on shipping. It took a couple months longer than printing in China, but the print-on-demand card quality was higher.
For all of these printing methods, preparation was the same. Design the cards in Illustrator, and follow the printers directions to prepare the individual files (PDF or PNG, depending on the service). MPC has a tool that you use to upload the images and layout the deck. Panda and ShuffledInk take the PDFs or Illustrator files for layout, then send you a digital proof to approve.
I liked learning about Drawbot being created by Guido's brother!
I do not understand how to play these cards, are these the backs? I thought maybe the number of dots is the number - oh wait, there are 12 dots. Is the "bird" a suite or a Royal? etc
I think the graphics are very visually appealing; thank you for sharing.
They are not a game, they are not playing cards. They’re more like flash cards although not intended to exclusively be used as such.
It appears the exercise is more one of representing the concepts as an info graphic.
The other sides of the cards are text explanation.
Great job. The deck looks great. Not so sure about the article though.
“Graphic designers have a good, often innate, understanding of patterns, mathematics, logic, and balance.” Shouldn’t be surprising to anyone—that’s like being surprised a good programmer also has a good understanding of logic.
This reads like a very thinly veiled of showing off your project and the process of designing it. A bit dishonest if you ask me.
Kinda. But the breakdowns about the visual language, balance, etc. were interesting to me (I have zero GD experience/education).
Give the author their flowers.
Honestly there are worse things to write about. I too am a hard nerd who migrated from backend to frontend and dabbled in design. The discovery of typography, design rules, graphing principles, etc. felt to me like a revelation far outstripping the initial project(s) that inspired them. I read _The Elements of Typographic Style_ (Bringhurst) and Tufte and I read Nielsen's blog every day (back when it was at useit.com).
I wish in retrospect I'd written an article like this one; the wonder is genuine, and the satisfaction from the discovery of heretofore-invisible but trivially demonstrable rules is significant.
Finally, would point out that the author of this piece currently does not have any cards for sale, because they are sold out. :) So not only would it be ethically _ok_ to write an interesting piece that as a side-effect did some art self-promotion (if that were for example the reason the cards sold out,) but we know that, now and going forward, this article _cannot serve as a sales funnel_ because there is nothing being sold!
So, no, this article is fine and the cards are very interesting. I wish I'd been able to order a set, frankly