Going into the card back designs I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do but I was interested in the possible inclusion of a gradient. These are a few different variations I played with.
In some other custom game decks I had seen a lot of them use the name on the backs of the cards, I assume to build brand recognition. So that is where I started, at this point I had decided on the typeface for the game title (Eckmann) and was interested in placing this on the backs. The type on its own seemed to flat and so I decided to include a slight drop shadow to the text in green. I had rotated the text in order to fit it better on the back however I didn't really like how that looked. Especially as the cards would be looked at portrait to read them it didn't make sense that when you flipped the card that the type would be a different orientation. So I decided to move on from this concept.
After turning the type back to portrait, the design seemed looked like it needed another element to share the space. I played with different orientations of the bull head and type but it never felt balanced. I even introduced the triskele patterns to see how that would fit help but that was not the case.
Moving on from there I decided to drop the text and just focus on the bull head symbol. I kept the triskele symbols as complimenting background imagery for the bull to sit on. I feel like the 4th version of this design below is the most successful however there still felt like it wasn't getting the message across. I also knew that I wouldn't be able to use green as the background colour as that is going to be used as one of the 4 suit colours and it will only confuse players.
After feeling like I wasn't making much headway I went back to an idea I'd had about creating a repeat pattern to symbolise aspects of the story. Overall I feel the third design had the most potential but still felt too much like a standard poker card back. It also had too much of a focus on the gradient than I would prefer.
