The Ellusionist Playing Card Co. Magical Designs.
Ellusionist is a world leader educating magicians and creating innovative magical props and playing cards. In the early 2000’s the revolutionised the playing card industry by developing what is considered to be the original premium custom playing card design, creating the now bustling custom card market that exists today.
Over a several year partnership ODIS, in particular creative director Oban Jones, has created tens of revolutionary playing card designs for the Ellusionist playing card company. The styles, processes and uses of the designs vary a great deal, touching on multiple distinct styles and disciplines. Several of the charity playing card designs created for Ellusionist have gone on the raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for important natural preservation causes.
Classical Playing Card Design.
Playing cards have many uses spanning premium collectors items, high impact flourishing designs, and the all important classical work horse. Creating designs for this latter category, designs that are both engaging and exciting whilst sitting neatly within the classical playing card design trends is a tightrope, a tightrope we have successfully navigated with several incredibly popular designs.
Premium Playing Cards
Not usually meant for every day use by magicians or other card handlers, these designs could push the boat out a little more. This gives a great opportunity to experiment with high quality print processes, opulent detail and more outlandish themes. The name of the game with these designs is to focus on beauty, story and collectibility. We make sure to underpin this designs to well structured narrative and oodles of research to really sell the concept and make that piece and needs to be shown off.
For example the story behind the Official Jurassic Park deck was that it was a deck of cards from the original parks gift shop, left to the abuse of the elements and dinosaurs since 1993. To help sell this idea we studied toy graphics from the period to give the design a real sense of place, and added invisible swell ink to the box to give the feel of rot and decay.
The Bold & The Beautiful.
Flourishing with cards has become more popular in recent years, and often what can attract a expert card handler to a design is hold cool it looks in the hand and in motion. This opens the door to some exciting designs that strip away a lot of the classical rules of card design. The design doesn’t just have to look good in print, it has to create an effect as it flips from one hand to another.
