Illustration aces

The online magazine Digital Abstracts has gathered together a whole pack of talented digital creatives with the mission of producing a new deck of individually illustrated playing cards. Creative Cards is due to be released in the next couple of weeks and includes numerous Computer Arts favourites including Joshua Davis, Shotopop, Zutto, Justin Maller and many more.

Latvian designer Vlad Korzinin works on the Digital Abstracts blog with Andreas Shabelnikov, Dmitry Melkov and several other contributors. "Dmitry shared the idea of creating these cards with me and I thought it was brilliant," says Korzinin. "The next day we launched a website and starting writing to designers to hear their thoughts about this idea. We had 95 per cent positive feedback and the others 5 per cent just haven't answered yet."

For him the project is special because it's a collaboration, and also because it's not just about making pretty pictures. When the cards are printed, Korzinin looks forward to holding them in his hands and hopes people will play using them. "And of course, its a good additional promotion for everybody who are involved," he adds.

The majority of contributors to the deck are artists who have been interviewed or had their work shown on the Digital Abstracts site before. They're not making random images to appear on the face of each card. The inspiration for each piece of artwork has to come from the card itself, so you'll see all kinds of different renderings of hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades.

In addition to the 54 illustrators selected to each create an image for all the cards in a standard deck, Digital Abstracts held an online competition to select a piece of art to go on the back of the cards. Entries were voted on and the winner was Giga Kobidze. Watch for the release of the printed cards - a very limited number is being made.