In The Big Score you are a gang of thieves looking to pull the heist of the decade and make it out with the biggest score. To do this you will have to work together to slip past cameras, crack locks, and befriend guard dogs. Only one of you can win in the end, earning the title as the world’s greatest thief.
The art for The Big Score came about primarily from practicality, then being shaped into a cohesive style. The face of each card had to be easily distinguishable around a table of up to 6 players, but the backs of the cards had to be identical. Standard poker cards are the perfect example of how to achieve legibility under these circumstances. large type, unique but simple icons, and distinct colors were the order of the day.
The style came from a similar place as the theme, most of the heist movies I grew up watching either came from or were set in the 60’s and 70’s. Oceans Eleven, The Italian Job, Catch Me if You Can. Even modern heist media seems to have a soft spot for the time period with movies like Logan Lucky, Baby Driver, and The Bad Guys. These modern movies, while not set in the mid 20th century, certainly have one foot firmly planted in the iconic colors, sound, and irreverence of the era. All this together meant to me, a Technicolor pallet of saturated colors and clean flat icons with bold, but informal text.
To actually make the art I used Adobe Illustrator, a vector based program being ideal for scaling icons to whatever size I need them. I then exported everything and compiled it using Adobe InDesign, linking the image sources to an easy to use print document. This layout meant that I could re-export any image or edit any source text and, as long as the file name remained the same, the print document would automatically update making tweaking after testing far easier.