Eye Magazine

You wouldn’t want to play poker or spit with a pack like this, but type-spotters will probably devise their own game.

Hat-Trick’s Jim Sutherland came up with the idea of making a deck of typographic playing cards during an idle moment while on holiday in Crete a couple of years ago (see notebook spread at the bottom). ‘It was like solving 54 micro design problems,’ he says, explaining that he devised a few rules for the self-imposed assignment: ‘No repeated typefaces … no alteration.’

Sutherland creates variation through some ingenious repetitions and superimpositions of type, from an elaborately interlaced Snell Roundhand (8 of spades) to a brutalist Gill Sans Ultra Bold (10 of clubs). The sans serif joker (above) is made of Avant Garde Gothic Medium, the serif one is Didot.

You can see the entire pack in this 52-second animation:

Hat-Trick have also produced an embossed poster (below) of the cards, which they will eventually get round to selling through shops or online. Until then, anyone interested in purchasing them (card deck or poster) should contact [email protected].

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