The Collection - Photo Book
Objective
To design a photo book with a theme or topic of your choice. Create a title and include typography on the cover and inside the book.
Concept
For this project, I decided to photograph cards in my brother’s playing card collection. I also decided to make the photo book itself a deck of playing cards, which required me to have 54 “pages” or cards, as I also included the jokers.
Photographic Process
Before taking the photos I went through my brother’s collection and created 4 themes to correspond with the 4 suites. Since each suite would feature multiple decks of cards I wanted there to be an overall theme for each suite. These themes may not be obvious to some, but organizing them this way helped me with the process of photographing and editing. When it came to photographing I took a halogen light stand into a dark room and placed the cards on a small table covered in black fabric to keep the photos consistent.
Colors
Since the cards I photographed had multiple colors, I decided that any additional color I added would be red, like what you’d see on traditional playing cards, and everything else would be grayscale.
Final Process
Once I had my photos taken and edited, I created a master template for all my cards. I used this template for printing and determining the size of the cards and all the elements on them. Once I created my suite symbols and got them all in place on the cards with their corresponding numbers I was ready to add the photos. The final task was to design the box the cards would go in. Since all the cards featured have very different styles I chose to focus on one key element they all share, the suits. I took the suit symbols I had already made and formed a pattern with them and repeated it all around the box. Once that was done, I added a gradient overlay to tone down the pattern and to allow some space at the top for the title. I also added an index on the back of the box which lists all the names of the decks of cards pictured.
