[Deck in development] Standard French playing cards + Tarot

[munik]

Hello everybody!

 

I'm a graphic designer and as a personal project I'm trying to develop a tarot/playing card deck, I have the idea to unite the Rider Waite tarot deck and the standard French playing cards, since they have a shared history somewhere down the line it seemed to me like an interesting idea.

 

I want to make the deck as approachable and basic as possible, my goal is to take the Rider Waite illustrations and bring them way down to their basic meaning, while keeping in mind the original illustrations.

 

Right now I used the original Rider Waite illustrations just to sketch and get an idea of how to interpret the tarot suits to the French playing card suits, but eventually I will make custom illustrations. (See the attached image.)

 

I would like your honest opinion about the project, the idea is still very much in development.

I'm already running into a problem you might be able to help me with: both 'Knight' and 'King' start with a K, which is confusing when putting the same letter at the corners at both of the cards. Do you have any suggestions for this? Should I swap out the Knight cards for the Jack cards from the French cards?

 

I'm very much a newbie to tarot, so I'm very open to any suggestions and critique.  :)

 

[Trogon]

This is an interesting concept. I like the ones you put up images of. If the deck were published, would you include instructions for one of the Tarocchi-type games? I could see using this for both game playing as well as divination. You used the phrase "standard French playing cards", but these look like pretty standard cards regardless of a country of origin, so to me, the designation of "French" doesn't mean much. I'm assuming the suit of Diamonds corresponds to Coins/Pentacles?

 

As far as the King/Knight designation, could you use "K" for King and "Kn" for Knight?

[HiddenHero]

Perhaps you could use J (for Jack) like in vanilla playing cards.

[Starlight]

What about Valet or Chevalier, Dame and Roi - the pictures themselves would show a non-French speaker which court card it was.

[BlueToy]

It looks interesting.  Do you have any images of the courts? I'd like to see how same/different they are with the trumps. :)

[reall]

Perhaps you could use J (for Jack) like in vanilla playing cards.

or R as Rider?!XD like idea here! hope it see it completed one day!^^ ;)