By far, the hand I was most excited to brand, which is amazing considering just how god awful of a starting hand this is. I personally refer to 2-7 offsuit as "Good Ol' 169" because, out of 169 possible starting hands, this hand ranks #169.
But that made it all the more interesting for design. Right away, I thought of making it look like a worn poorly designed logo — perhaps looking like it wasn't designed at all.
The 2 and 7 are rendered in Helvetica Bold. The spade, heart, diamond, and club icons are from Zapf Dingbats. I split the suit icons and combined them haphazardly, I separated the 2 and 7 so that it wouldn't read "27," and I made sure that no elements were on the same ground vertically. Actually, I didn't really "make sure" so much as I placed them and called it a composition. Turns out that the secret to making something look like it wasn't designed... is to not design it.
I added wear to the edges of all the shapes and a worn texture over top using blurring and sharpening (using Cameron Moll's tutorial here: http://cameronmoll.com/archives/000024.html). I rendered the 7 in red to further emphasize the cards being offsuit.
And that's it. I mean, this is the secondhand shop that takes the clothes Goodwill rejects. This is the number stenciled on the side of the house in a trashy neighborhood. Coincidentally, the club top on the diamond bottom resembles an ice cream cone, and the heart top on the spade bottom resembles a butterfly. On a stand (?). Which is fine — it represents the rare instance in which this starting hand actually pans out into a winner.
(If you play this hand and win, prepare to be heckled. With good reason.)
Completely inverse to the actual value of the hand, I really like how it turned out. Its poor design represents just how worthless the hand is. Which makes it good design. Kinda.
In the same breath, just like you shouldn't play 2-7 offsuit like a winner, I probably should be doing intentionally bad design and calling it good. ;-)
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