52 Circles

The first inlay design in a series of 52; one a week.

I have always loved the bear icon from KGB’s club in Rounders. The problem is that it’s so totemic that you can’t come close to it without feeling like you’ve gone too close to the thing.

Well, finding a nice and clean example of a letterpressed (or maybe it was a woodcut or linocut) print of a black bear walking certainly helped put distance between KGB/ASM’s stock lineart bear and this one.

The imagined brief was my last name: Tan. White + Brown = Tan. I teamed up with a classmate in graduate school for a semester of Urban Housing studies, his name was Whiting. We used to write ‘Beige’ on the critic signup list each week. Only the two of us thought it was funny.

Well, Jared, here’s to ‘team Beige’. In this case, team Tan. Or White+Brown=Tan.

So, bear+Tan+denom.

Denoms are ALWAYS a PITA. I never know where to park the denom. The illustration and the name always want to have the first and second location positions, which means the third wheel that is the denom losing out. Other more successful designs make sure the user/viewer sees the denom first by either position, size or color or a combination of any of those three.

I rarely do that, mostly because it just shouts ‘USEABILITY’. I know it’s a functional thing and you should listen, because at the end of the day, if your players keep peppering you with questions about which chips are what denoms you’ll chuck them out the window.

Well for this one, the denom is middle south. And I’m using the old school hotstamp TRK convention of overwriting the ’10′ with ‘cents’ to save length space.

EDIT 1: As for the font selected, I initially though this would be a hotstamp design, and therefore wanted something that would lend itself well to the stamping artifacts like flash and the face scuffing from scraping.

Bell Centennial Std – Bold Listing was used throughout.

Bell Centennial Standard article

If the design did end up as a hotstamp, a lot of the detail would have to be flushed out, but the gist of the black and white would remain. The font’s designed traps and other idiosyncrasies could possibly help or maybe create interesting ‘flash’ artifacts. I love the swelling belly on the ’1′ numeral. And the way the capital N looks like a clothing pin to me.

BTW, “Wearing the Crown”? I have no idea. It rhymed with Brown. Write a comment. Give me something else to put down there. I was born in 1970. Kind of hit a wall. May have to revisit in a day or two.

Edit 2: adding some color. Click the gallery thumbnails for the full size versions.

Again, I’m learning that at the 1″ round scale, detail size matters. The light green ribbon is practically a line because it’s not sized appropriately. And I’m loading up again instead of editing down, but that’s a tendency and I’m aware of it. Editing down later in the week, I guess.

This wordpress theme wanted me to stick successive image attachments in as gallery pics, which was not my original intent, but it seems to help, because I get a side by side reading. I guess I’ll find out how many images triggers the next page break in the gallery view line…