I’m trying to finish designing my English alphabet poster series. Still missing 10 letters (there’s a poster for each letter of the alphabet, surrounded by ~ 80-110 vintage illustrations of words that begin with a given letter, each labelled), and I’m starting to feel a bit stressed.

Had all of January + February to finish them, which should have been do-able, but then I had three separate client assignments fall into my lap, and couldn’t afford not to take them. Didn’t finish a single poster in January 😔

Also itching to get started on a new branch for my little solo company — creating printable activity sheets (think fancy-design word searches, mazes, word puzzles, dot-to-dot drawings, word scrambles, code breaking puzzles) for daycare/schools/museums, etc.

I’m hoping I can supplement my posters, opening up a new market for my company (marketing/selling children’s posters to private individuals is hard, especially with extremely limited marketing funds, combined with a profound marketing ineptitude), as well as having something in the way of free downloads/printables I can use as SoMe eye-catchers. Hopefully also creating more awareness for my posters in the process. But I need to finish that alphabet series first, so my investor (a parent) doesn’t loose all patience with the project 😬

Then there’s the new shiny idea of creating a Dobble/Spot It!-like card game, also using material from my vast collection of vintage/public domain graphics.

I’ve managed to hobble together some Python code that can generate the data for the cards (“card 1 must have ill’s. 01, 03, 05, 11, 12 …”, “card 2 must have ill’s. 02, 07 …”) according to to the “Dobble formula” (possible cards & number of needed unique illustrations with X illustrations on each card = X^2 - X + 1, where X is a prime number + 1), based on my input for X.

I can then put that data in a spreadsheet, add filenames and descriptions/tags for each illustration, and (hopefully, if I can remember how, as it’s been a while) generate all the finished print files for the cards by feeding the data to InDesign as a CSV.

Going to try to make a mockup with 12 images on each card, and looking at prices for big, custom game cards (A6 / 105 x 148.5 mm / 4.1 x 5.8 inches), with a deck size of 100 cards (technically, the amount of possible cards with X = 12 is 133, but even at 100 cards, the prices start to become prohibitively expensive, at least when looking at the small batch sizes I could conceivably afford).

But, oh yeah, need to stay focused on the main task, getting those posters done first! 🙄

Incidentally, if anyone has some interesting and/or fun Dobble/Spot It! house rules they’d like to share, I’m all ears! Any and all thoughts on possible gameplay with 100 unique, oversized, rectangular game cards, each card with 12 illustrations (animals, vehicles, minerals, historical characters …), and each always having a single illustration in common with any other given card, are also of interest 😁