Reward Cards research

After getting the job of the reward cards, I immediately started looking at different card designs in games and seeing which ones were effective and those that weren't. I first looked at an old game of monopoly, and studied the chance cards.

These cards are extremely simple, with just bold words and the occasional simple drawing such as the arrow. The writing is in the centre of the card, in typed in capital letters. This makes the words bold, and jump off the card. The use of bold writing on a plain background is very effective in drawing the attention to the words, and not overcomplicating them, which is a look I used on the back of the cards.

I also looked at the cards from 'Pay Day'. These cards were all very colourful and had detailed images on them. However the text style was similar to the monopoly cards, with a white background and black text, to stand out on the card. The front of the cards also portrayed exactly what the card was, for example a post card had the look of a letter on the front of the card. This makes it easy for the cards to be identified.

After deciding on the style of my cards, I began looking at Red Dead Redemption to examine the types of rewards that were around at that time. From the game I realised the main three were:

• Poker Chips
• Hides
• Money

From this I got the idea of creating an R (for reward) out of money. This was one of my original concepts:

 From this I developed this idea: