By Andrea Dudrow

It's hard to imagine a time when people didn't grow up playing games with playing cards. Stalwarts of the game world, playing cards are older than Scrabble, older than Monopoly, older even than Parcheesi. Images from playing cards are etched into our consciousness: the one-eyed jack, the suicide king, the ace of spades. But this is the digital age, and, thanks to a little help from technology, playing cards are taking up residence in it.

U.S. Playing Card, the Ohio-based company that makes the popular Bee, Bicycle, and Aviation decks of cards, has recently moved over to an all-digital workflow in which the cards, as well as newer, themed decks, are designed in Adobe® Illustrator® and Photoshop® software and printed right in the company's manufacturing plant.

"Just up until two years ago, some of the artwork was still being hand-inked," says Greg Conyers, art director at U.S. Playing Card. "But now it's totally digital: Everything's being drawn in Illustrator. We're even taking out old designs and scanning them and streamlining them in Illustrator." Conyers says he chose Illustrator because he's become familiar with the software through the years. "It's the ease and comfort level of the program," he says. These days, after a design is drawn in Illustrator, Conyers sends it to a service bureau to generate the film. When the film comes back, the folks at U.S. Playing Card burn a plate for it and print and finish the card decks in their own plant. The entire deck is printed on one sheet of stock, and the individual cards are then punched out. The company's proprietary card stock is actually laminated before the cards are printed on it. Conyers says this comes in handy for some of the newer see-through decks they are working on.

The art department at U.S. Playing Card is occupied mainly with designs for new decks and decks for licensing deals, such as those with casinos. "The standards have not been redesigned very often," Conyers says. "People want them to stay as they are; it's how they recognize them. We have contemporized them slightly, but we don't do much to the standard brands." However, casino work is now a large part of the company's business. "They go through a lot of cards, and there has just been a boom with casinos being built around the country and around the world," Conyers explains.

In addition to licensing work, Conyers says U.S. Playing Card is getting into new types of package design, all with the help of Illustrator and Photoshop. The company has been making collectors' tins that come with two different decks of cards in a decorative sleeve and has also been moving into more kids' packaging. "We did several different packaged items for Pokemon," Conyers says. "And we're just shipping a Powerpuff Girls property: little mini decks packaged in a vinyl purse that kids can reuse."

Package design is a natural extension of playing card design, Conyers says, because "most everything we do, from designing the cards to the designs that decorate the cards, to the sales promotions for the products, is dealing with packaging." In addition, U.S. Playing Card creates its own games and designs playing cards to go with them.

Even though U.S. Playing Card is happily using a digital workflow these days, one of the company's most interesting projects came before the age of Illustrator. During World War II, the company created decks that were distributed among European POW camps. According to U.S. Playing Card Marketing Director Allen McCormick, the special card decks could be moistened and pulled apart. Once assembled in sequence, they revealed a map of escape routes throughout Europe.

Now that's a good card trick.