After feeling like I'd hit a bit of a wall I decided to go back over the designs I had created in developing the character backgrounds. For the sake of it I decided to go back to the background I had settled on for the cards and see what that would look like. I figured that if I could make the design work it would also bring more cohesion to the deck.
I started off by adding in the gradient I had been using in my other card back designs to see how that looked. The composition of this felt really interesting and liked that you didn't need to see the whole of the symbol to understand what it was. I then played around with adding the triskele symbol in white over top to give a cut out effect but it seemed too busy. I also didn't like how it put so much emphasis on the triskele symbol. Whilst I have been using the symbol as a key visual element, it is not necessarily tied to the story and I don't think it needed to have as much focus put on it as these designs had.
After taking off the white triskele symbol I decided to see if the bull head would look good in it's place, I liked these designs however they didn't seem like they would work as card backs. In fact it reminded me more of a box design than a card back.
I took a slight detour to investigate how I could potentially include a solely type based composition. However my designs for this always felt a bit visually complicated, the type seemed to just hide the pattern but also the pattern seemed to make the type lose legibility.
I also tried out some overlapping of the patterns and seeing what the triskeles would look like at different scales and rotations. These were interesting but again felt like they were giving the triskele symbol too much focus.
With the triskeles being given so much focus I decided to apply the same design except using the bull heads, as they are a key part of the story. I tried out a few different variations of this using different scales and opacity levels however it just felt very boring. The scaling of the heads didn't feel as visually interesting as the triskeles had and no matter how much refining I did it never looked balanced enough.
Going back to the previous design I tried including the bull head and text. However the compositions of these just seemed messy and complicated.
At this point I realised I was trying to do to much - I had liked the concept I had created at the start and so I decided to apply my green colour to the trisele design and see how it looked. I was really impressed with how this looked - it ties all the colours of the deck in whilst not being too overbearing. Lastly, I mirrored the design so that the backgrounds and the backs would not end up looking too similar and cause confusion in gameplay.
