Hello, everyone! I am new to the forums here, so I will start with a brief introduction. My name is Martin Pulido, and I am philosophy graduate who also happens to love card games (as well as board games). Card games not only illustrate philosophical ideas (War=Determinism), but many are also great practice in extrapolating what you don't know through what you do know from both cards played, cards in one's hand, and studying the decisions and faces of one's fellow players. I have recently wanted to get back into drawing and design, and so I created a project for myself: to create a deck of western philosophy themed playing cards that would be (1) aesthetically pleasing, (2) thought provoking, and (3) functional. An ambitious goal, but I think the decks could be lots of fun for philosophy and playing card enthusiasts, and to play with a group of friends.

Through much deliberation, I determined to organize the suits according to philosophical time periods: spades (ancient and medieval philosophers), diamonds (modern philosophers: 16th-18th c.), clubs (contemporary analytic philosophers: 19th - 21st c.), and hearts (contemporary continental philosophers: 19th - 21st c.). Each card suit also has a unique card face background, highlighting ideas taught by philosophers in the specified time period. These backgrounds are gray or a faint red on white depending on the suit, and I hope help in suit identification. I prefer the white backgrounds/borders as they limit damage from scuffing (or so I believe; maybe I am wrong?).

Each card contains a personally hand-drawn and then vectorized and digitally finished portrait of an important philosopher. I tried to find a famous depiction (if not the most famous) of the philosopher, regardless of the medium (sculpture, drawing, painting, photo, etc.) and then redraw it to have a more consistent look across the cards. Many design decisions were tough: I looked up in biographies to discover the hair color of many philosophers, but with ancient philosophers, I just had to arbitrarily decide. I also had to make decisions on clothing. Here is an example of the design process from the original famous depiction to the hand-drawn art, to the vectorized art, and the digitally-finished piece:


Since each card, versus just the royal court face cards, portrayed a specific philosopher, my initial design does not include pips. However, I have some alternatives that do include them, so your feedback would be appreciated. I recognize that for some not having pips will be a downer. 12-16 philosophers, however, didn't seem to cut it for the deck, so I had to make a call, which ended up being a lot more work for me! Maybe it was a bad decision.

The next step was to make the cards "thought provoking." I concluded to include a quote from each philosopher that wasn't loaded with jargon, so it could be understood by the layman. I also tried not to pick quotes that were (a) cliche, (b) made funny trite statements but said little philosophically, (c) made little sense out of context (Nietzsche's "God is dead" for instance), (d) ridiculed the philosopher by making his ideas appear impossible to understand (Heidegger's statement "The nothing itself nothings" is often used in this respect), or (e) were too religious (this deck is about philosophy, not theology or religious dogmas). On (e), I have no aversion to religion; I am a practicing Christian myself, so don't get the wrong idea. Anyway, getting the right quotes required lots of reading, careful selection, and revision.

Anyway, here are some samples of the art: 2 cards from each suit.


That should give you some idea of the style of the cards I have gone for and substantiate what I claimed about the design above.

I have a few alternate designs I have been toying with (original in top right for comparison's sake), but I still prefer the original:


Oh, and ignore the Derrida line over Anaximander; it was just there to test out how long a quote could go in that orientation. For the tuckbox, I chose to recreate a section of Raphael's famous School of Athens piece. I kept Plato and Aristotle at the forefront of the piece, but replaced the figures around them in Raphael's version with philosophers from later eras (Bertrand Russell, Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, etc.). I think the piece turned out quite nice, but the artist is usually biased! Here is a crude mockup of the tuckbox:


As for the backs, the tuckbox shows how I have created a vertical symmetrical back based on the famous flammarion engraving of a man grasping the universe as it is in its reality instead of in its appearance (or at least this is one interpretation of how the engraving has been used). I think it has turned out nicely too:


So on to my feedback questions:

(1) What do you think of the overall design? Do I succeed at making the deck aesthetically pleasing, thought provoking, and functional? While I had to make definite trade offs between those different goals, is it overall satisfactory? What suggestions would you make that align with those goals?

(2) Would any of you be interested in a deck if I tried to create a kickstarter project? What would be a fair price range for a deck (the low range being what you would be enthusiastic about and the high range being what you would still think is fair)? I don't want to start such a project if there isn't the interest...

Wow....nice job. I think I agree with you on the "original design" being the best. The only thing I think would beat it is if you can make a fully up/down symmetric version with the quote and everything.....but I think it would be too crowded. The price depends alot on what sort type of cards you use.....I wouldn't mind paying 50 bucks (or more) for a Kem set of those. I'm not much of a philosophy guy, but I know a couple of people who would really like them as a gift, so I'd probably get a few decks at that price.

FWIW I don't think you will make $$$ off these by trying to sell them "door to door" so to speak. The design looks pretty good though and you could send out emails and make phone calls to specialty stores (maybe starting with some campus stores or the bookstore). This is a specialty item that you could have some success with if you were willing to put in the time it takes to find contact a gazillion different little shops and stores. I probably gave my 2 cents that you didn't ask for but I think you did a great job with the design and was just trying to help. Good luck :-)

Yeah I would definitely be interested in a couple of decks, really good job.

Nice job — they're cool.

Very minor nitpick: In the Descartes quotation you have two em dashes (these —), but you wrote each as a double hyphen. That was correct back when everyone used manual typewriters, but is no longer accepted practice.

those cards look awesome. great work! i'm not a philosophy enthusiast, but i really like the design and look of it all.

Original design is by far the best. The others are far too "busy." You have a ton of interesting stuff going on on the card; as a result simple is best and allows each part to be enjoyed without adding any more clutter than it needs.

Not sure if you've ever heard of it, but the card game Authors and it's many variants uses the same style to great effect. (Incidentially, they have variants featuring scientists, and another featuring inventors, but none featuring philosophers.)

Question: what material will the cards be? Will they be similar to Bicycle cards? Plastic?

I want to buy one deck of card.

To me , it looks good , but I am not qualified to give you any advice on marketing and so on.

If you manage to print them though , pm me cuz I want to buy one.

This is a fun idea. GJ and GL.

The middle-top design looks best to me.

I liked that one more too, the original being second and the others I didn't like.

Nice work. Congrats.

I liked the original the best (Pic J4,A9 etc). Much much better than the rest because it is offering great detail on face and the notes below are not at all killing the aesthetics of the art plus it is classic conventional for standard textbook bios (ie people are more used to it) and not at all tiring to the eye.

Now what you need to do is get some advice about how to legally protect your idea/work (if that is a doable thing on the idea).

It can easily have a great place as an item in Amazon for example and sell thousands worldwide.


But here is an idea that can also be great and launch for you a very profitable small - eventually big business with much much greater customer basis. Imagine that you offer a customer this possibility;

Select among different fields (Math, Physics, Chemistry, Biology,Medicine, Space Science etc) or Philosophers , Literature/Authors/Poets, Musicians/Composers, Sports figures or Actors/Actresses or Artists even Mythological heroes or historic figures, politicians etc.

Then select the particular favorites you want to have in your own deck either by topic or mix them up to create 52 of your favorite people across any field.

So select out of maybe 20 different topics/fields that each one has 100/200 or more people (and add many women too for proper balance). You can have a possible space of 20*200=4000 famous people from all times and all fields of the human epic!

Imagine now if the customer can originally select either some 10-20 standard 52 card decks of mass produced/fixed design (like say one of them is your original idea with 52 philosophers of your own choice-not customer's) OR and here is the big profit margin possibility; Imagine if the customer (through a website submission process) is able to design their own deck by selecting a group of 52 of their own choice across a field or many fields even and have it custom made. Now this is harder to realize but maybe not necessarily so (since i am clueless and have no idea how hard it is but it may turn out to be very easy) if one can get some proper procedure started about how to print according to customer order or manually assemble it from a big room with many boxes.

Most certainly now each customer has the possibility to have a unique in existence deck of cards nobody else has (imagine the huge astronomical number of combinations) according to their own selection of favorite people either in one field or even a mixture of fields why not.

I have no idea how to price this although i see in amazon most decks are like 2-15$. A special art deck could be 15-30 who knows. But a custom made one could go for a lot higher even 50-100 why not. Maybe my numbers are not realistic but you can research it.

The advantage of customer selecting their own heroes is that you may now get multiple orders from a customer (some special discount for such multiple orders).

That way you create a very unique collectors' item that has very limited numbers possibly even only 1. You also create the opportunity for people to give teenagers or adult friends gifts that are of educational value (or related to their fields) motivating them to go and read more about these people and their work or recognize that you made a gift with them and their interests in mind which is always a special gesture.

Obviously some special deal with those printing can be reached or you can basically bypass that by printing all 10000-40000 possible cards (say 20*200 say across all say 10-20 fields and heroes 100-200 per field ) times 52 (for each person)=208000 cards. As a result now someone ordering can always create any deck they want and you simply find it one by one in an easy manner that no longer requires custom printing, only custom deck assembly.

You can offer also a customer the chance to have a deck of their favorite people but the rank and suits selected by you not them (for a discounted price) that way making sure you do not have created surpluses of particular cards because people dont select them often (Eg maybe people put Einstein too often of Ah say and never of 4d lol)

I am trying to give you ideas about how to create something unique that people wouldn't be able to find anywhere else that could exponentially increase your customer pool and create a fashion trend you fully control (if you can protect the idea from replication - not sure how doable this is).

Depending on the final cost per card for you i can start seeing a very lucrative business idea here if properly advertised could have you filling orders worldwide.

I imagine you can, based on the custom build-extra-choice, elevate your profit margins substantially above the typical 2-15$ range per deck and still make it look like a good deal for the customer that has the feeling they created something nobody else has.



Finally i can also imagine extending this to more than card decks. How about being able to make a custom coffee table book type thing with your favorite people/topics that includes now full pages with much more data and pictures where you can literally spend hours reading. That would make nice educational present for kids.

The topics here are unlimited. Can you imagine a coffee table book with the most successful moon missions by US and Russia or the spacecrafts visiting other bodies of the solar system? Or it can be a book about flowers or famous architects and their work, famous ships, airplanes, the combinations are so many.

I have no idea how possible it is these days to create a custom book like that but you would be providing a great gift idea that extends far more above playing cards and therefore inviting far greater spectrum of customers.


A proper coffee table book with cool art work/pictures/info that can keep you busy for hours inspiring and educating you is a cool gift indeed.

You could start from cards and end up selling so much more.

Ps: The coffee table book idea today with e-readers like Kinddle and tablets etc can be a lot more feasible in the custom build sense. But of course that is a different smart handheld devices era thing not a tangible object so it has less of a collector's value i suppose but quite possibly a customer basis of millions now if sold cheaply enough.

I wouldn't buy a deck because it's not my thing however I'm impressed with the look of it and the thought you've put into it. I hope you successfully market this and as said above, think about protecting your intellectual property.

Send me a PM when you get to the point your selling the final product, I want to get 4 or 5 decks to use as fun gifts for a couple peoples birthdays.

Great production values on these.