The first digitally-produced deck of cards

The first digitally-produced deck of cards

The first ever digitally design and produced deck of cards was created by Adobe in 1988 as a proof of concept.  It was an inflexion point in graphic design, publishing, and most importantly (to me), playing card design.

In 1988, Adobe Systems introduced the revolutionary Adobe Illustrator. To showcase this emerging graphics tool and technology,  they created the Adobe Deck as a corporate give-away for the 1988 Comdex Show. The deck was designed using Adobe Illustrator 88™ software and typefaces from the Adobe® Type Library. Adobe Separator™ was used to create the plate-ready separations, and the artwork was transmitted to the printing press using Adobe Postscript®.  It’s unclear how many decks were produced but I’m pleased to own a few of them in mint condition.

At that point, Ruth Kedar had already designed (but not published!) two decks digitally for her Master thesis: The Duolog and Analog decks. The principals from Adobe must have somehow heard about this and they asked to meet her.  As Ruth Kedar remembers it: “I was approached by Adobe to design a playing card deck for them for the Adobe Illustrator Launch... but one of the biggest barriers of entry for a software aimed at designers was that designers were very apprehensive about digital tools – they believed that all designs would look the same and that it would be the end of creativity. So I suggested instead of having me design the whole deck, we should instead assign a different designer to each suit, and achieve two goals: showcase illustrator capabilities and also show the individual styles of each designer.”

Jokers by Ruth Kedar and Paul Woods

Ruth Kedar designed the spades suit and a joker; Paul Woods designed the clubs and the second joker; Russell Brown designed the hearts and Gail Blumberg and Joss Parsey designed the diamonds. Here's six of each suit.

Russell Brown designed the hearts

Ruth Kedar designed the spades

Gail Blumberg and Joss Parsey designed the diamonds

Paul Woods designed the clubs

Gail Blumberg comments: “When I look at the deck now, I think the quality of the printing was really quite nice. I do regret the lack of rounded corners on the cards, which would have made them feel more like playing cards. The four-color gray on the back of the cards should have been printed as a Pantone Gray. But for cost purposes, we used four-color process printing (not Pantone colors) so the gray was composed of a mix of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.”

We used historical quotes as inspiration for the diamond set of cards, which showed off the Adobe Type Library, which was in its infancy in the 80s, and was an amazing tool for graphic designers to have.

The Packaging was Pretty Basic

Joss Parsey, when asked (July 2025) about this long ago project.   As background, I was recently employed at Adobe having come from a very traditional graphic design background. Many presentations back in those days (outside Adobe) were hand rendered. At Adobe, I  learned to use a computer as a graphic designer with typography being my  focus. It was an exciting moment to bridge the old approach to the future approach. It was clear typography was going to be a much faster process going forward..

Ruth Kedar

Gail Blumberg

Joss Parsey

Paul Woods

Designing the diamonds with Gail and researching the historical snip bits we would use was totally up my alley. We wanted to convey how typography could break out of the rules and columns of traditional layout and use the type library and the Adobe tools to showcase the software, basically having visual fun.  Back then, it would take the software time to create our designs but even then it was faster than hand rendering.I remember thinking that once the software was more developed, graphic design would completely change as would print production preparation.  

Looking back at this project made me realize how Adobe narrowed in on the future use of fonts using the original font designs and keeping true to their pedigree while developing the future font library.

At the US Playing Card Company, I believe they recognized the significance of the first digitally produced deck. They celebrated it by including the Adobe jokers on the USPC Joker Poster. The USPC poster is made up of jokers that were published as far back as 1895 with the bulk of them printed in early and mid 1900s. They picked mostly old and rare ones. Any new published ones? A few, lets do a countdown of the three most recently published jokers on the poster.

The third most recent joker is the Virginia Slims joker (first row, fifth one in) published by the US Playing Card Company for Philip Morris in 1984.This was also a historic joker since the Virginia Slims brand was celebrating women (and marketing to them) with the unforgettable line: “You’ve come a long way baby.”  The two most recent jokers on the poster are the two from the Adobe Deck of 1988 (6th row, 9th column and 10th row, 9th column). Not only are they the most recent, they are the only two jokers on the poster that come from the same deck.  

Adobe Joker

Sources

Correspondence with Ruth Kedar, Gail Blumberg, Joss Parsey
The International Journal of Type and Design, Volume 17-2.  Computer Age Playing Cards, Traditional images scuttled in computer-aided design. Spring 1990. Article by Ruth Kedar.  (https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ecdnmy3h2bqz0b926hy5c/Volume-17-2.pdf?rlkey=xsvv6j85eydhv2grpw9xyyyu4&e=2&st=eca3my1a&dl=0)

Current Sites

https://kedardesigns.com/
https://typenetwork.com/font-designers/gail-blumberg
https://www.jossprints.com/