Today I made the decision to eventually produce The 16 KEYS in a special format when they are for sale. The plan is to save up for a laser cutter to cut adhesive cardstock (of suiting colors) into stencils (from digitally prepared designs) — then adhese those over holo gold sheets. I see the designs for the backs also being purely stencil based, so I'd like double sided holo gold paper. I did some basic research to see if all those materials would be attainable (knowing it probably would) and I was pleased with the availability of choices. This would allow me to supply sales by demand, so that my costs would not be too high.
In contrast with The 64 CARDS, there is no reason of design integrity which prevents this. I was free to change one design rule about how I'm choosing to shape the images, in order to be more accommodating to stencils that don't fall apart while being produced. In doing this, there was no loss of special meaning to the shapes. For that reason, this is the first card set I'll be able to sell in such a way which allows me to produce it all at home with no enormous imposition on my schedule — meaning that the cost can be more reasonable. Also, this is a more beautiful and unusual way of doing it, which I believe will give me an edge.
The only downside to this is that in the process of working on The 16 KEYS today, there was a need to dramatically redesign 3 of my 4 cards after they were made :
The green card is KEY 11 ◊ SIMULATED PEOPLE, and the one that follows is KEY 1 ◊ BODY OF MASTERY. The red one that follows this pair is KEY 3 ◊ MIND OF WISDOM. All of these, as nice as they look, have smaller triangles punched out of the gold. It was decided that these types of designs might make for very delicate stencils to work with in production. But also, when visually comparing KEYS 1 & 11 with KEYS 2 & 3, I felt they looked too different from each other, anyway. I'd prefer more visual cohesion throughout the whole set.
It was a little hard to fix these by using inky sharpie and covering that with crayon — but at least I didn't have to start over, making a whole new card. For that reason, these cards with mistakes are gone forever.
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