Tarot Card Set

Project Brief

I began designing these Tarot cards early in 2019, with the deck completed sometime in May of 2020.

It originally started as a daily practice sort of project, just taking the Rider-Waite imagery of a tarot deck and reinterpreting it while still keeping the spirit of the card. I used a kind of semi-detailed illustrative style utilizing a LOT of gradients. This project was completely made in Illustrator, with a four-color palette.

At the time of starting this project, I didn’t really know too much about tarot cards or how to read them. So, I found myself googling and visiting multiple sites for each card I was making. It then dawned on me – while most card sets merely came with a booklet to reference the meaning of the cards, why not simply put the meaning of the the cards on the cards?

I used a number of sites to decide what words to put on the reversed and upright sides of the cards, and labelled each card with Roman Numerals, corellating to the numbered card of the major and minor arcana suites.

Remember how I said I didn’t really know how to use tarot cards? This is painfully obvious to anyone who passes over the major arcana to the minor arcana. The minor arcana, while when pulled indicates a more mundane divination than a major arcana card, still typically have their own illustrations. Me, not understanding, made the minor arcana look more like playing card suites. This makes it easier to identify a minor arcana card versus a major arcana card, but it does take some of the heart of a tarot deck away.

As stated above, I finalized this deck in May of 2020. I did a greyscale print in the previous fall, to make sure the size of the cards (2.5×3.25, a bridge card) felt right in the hand, while shuffling. After all, there are 72 cards in a tarot deck, almost 20 more than a playing deck. The greyscale revealed some contrast issues, but the card size was good. After some tweaks, I printed the cards myself on lettter-size cardstock, laminated them, and used a papercutter to cut them apart and remove the bleed. I repurposed an old Iphone box to make a box for the cards. I have used the cards since, for reading friends’ divinations for fun, mainly. They have held up well, though some of the laminate is peeling up.