A Brief Saga Concerning the Making of a Tarot Deck About the American Highway System
A little essay
In the winter of December 2015– 2016 I yearned to make something great. I had recently changed jobs from a little tech company to a large tech company, and I found myself feeling small. There were lots of amazing people all around me, executing high speed acts of incredible technological derring-do. I wanted to both prove that I was great and that I was different than the average cog in the wheel of the panopticon of convenience. Though, it is perhaps hard to say if I actually am or was, because I suspect that’s how everyone feels. Regardless, I set off to set myself apart from other engineers and tech workers by making something intricate yet technical, something quirky and literary: a tarot deck.
Tarot, for the uninitiated, is a system of divination that spans back hundreds of years. It has had many many variations in its time, but the form that it has converged on typically consists of seventy eight cards:
- Fifty Six: Four suits of fourteen cards a piece known as the minor arcana. They can be further divided into the number cards, one through ten, and the named cards, sometimes called the court. The suits that are involved typically vary deck to deck, but most follow that of the most famous deck, the Rider-Waite, which uses a quartet consisting of Coins, Wands, Swords, and Cups.
- Twenty two: When tarot are seen in popular media, it is often a member of this collection, the major arcana, which are displayed. These cards have evocative names like “The Fool”, “The Sun”, or “Death”. (According to wikipedia the fool is different than the rest of the major arcana, though it’s a little beyond me why/how.)
Divination using tarot usually takes the form of a tarot reading, in which the reader draws a number of cards in a particular layout and divines the future foretold therein. The specific details of this process are interesting, but they aren’t really the focus of this article.
Now, I wish I could tell you that this article was the regal announcement of something wonderful that I had made: something splendid and good that you could hold in your hands. Unfortunately, this is not that kind of article. Instead it is a retrospective on something that I wanted to be great and the way it fell short. It is a simple story, and may be just a little longer than you were hoping, but this is the only light that will ever shine on this project, so I want to shine it as long as I can.
Before we get into all that, let’s skip to the end and look at some of the results. Because thankfully, it wasn’t all for nothing:
THE THEME
Like many Americans, I love the highway. There is something amazing and comforting about the mixture of extreme variety of the ever changing countryside and the extreme sameness of the thing allowing us to move through those spaces. It is stilted at this late date to celebrate the mechanistically reproduced micro societies that adorn every so many miles of freeway, but i don’t care. Good lord, do I love the comfort of seeing the yellow scalloped logo of a Shell gas station rise steadily over the horizon after too long bending through vast distances. I love the regular-ness of knowing how many miles away an exit is based on its number, I love the simple brilliance of the numbering scheme that demarks a highway as north-south vs west-east. And importantly: I adore the direct and understandable signage that shines a light through a tangled web of roads criss-crossing this vast country.
You might even say that there is a certain magic that this all possesses.
My tarot deck, is one that tries to capture that magic. Tarot is a thing of signs and symbols, some decks are deeply riddled and enshrouded with elaborate meaning. I wanted to make a deck that held meaning in an interesting way but took a, perhaps, clearer route on its voyage with provenance.
THE BEGINNING
I am not a magical person. I am the grandson of a physicist, the child of skeptical modernist architects, a studier of physics and computer science. There is nothing about me that should lead to a pursuit of the mystical. However, when the muse calls, you listen. So I tried to make up for what I lacked in magic with diligent and attentive study. As you might expect, there is a vast body of literature on the internet to help guide and channel a nascent tarot designer, so I dug in.
Working, as I was through the course of this project, as a software engineer focused on data visualization and user interfaces, I had been developing a toolset for designing things and I diligently applied it here. I began typographically: I assembled a pallet of the official colors of the US highway system, and got a hold of the official font, the amazingly named Highway Gothic. (You can find it too, it’s not hard to find, it’s just not mine to give.)
I had been working a lot in Sketch, a program that is like illustrator for web development, and so I picked it as my design tool. After some initial sketching on paper I set off to work. I built modularly one section of the deck at a time, first the major arcana, then the numbered minor arcana, and the court. While I working on the major arcana I found myself in Mexico in a tourist resort town trying desperately to build a product for work over the new year. One memorable moment found me working on my tarot deck in an outdoor cafe near the edge of the jungle, when a dog suddenly fell through the ceiling.
I decided to base my symbology on a mix between the common Rider-Waite and Aleister Crowley’s Thoth tarot deck. I kept the legends on all of the cards like the Thoth, but bent more towards Rider-Waites visual themes and suit naming. Following on my chosen theme, I tried to make each card pictographic and symbolic, like it wouldn’t be out of place on a surreal exit sign (three miles down a magician is screwing something up). I found myself riding my motorcycle up and down the San Francisco Peninsula when I was stuck, often through the same stretches in Santa Cruz county again and again.
Things were going well. I seemed to find a voice that met with my goal and I was progressing as an artist. Of course, not every image turned out well (especially the whole suit of wands, jeez, I did not address those design problems very creatively), but as a whole it mostly worked. I got to the end and the whole court fell out of my head in about a week. It felt like I really knew what I was doing, like my plans had really clicked into place. I was happy that I had developed a repeating set of symbols, a collection of characters who would show up in different places throughout the deck (such as the woman with a hand for a face, what’s she up to in her various doings).
A SHOT AT THE END
By June of 2016 I had a version of the deck. Sure there were still lots of little tweaks to obsess over, but the thing finally had a form. The end goal for this project was to make a kickstarter, not for the purpose of getting money, just for the purpose of making there be lots of copies of the deck out there in the world. An unpopular adage from around that time was that Millennials all get one kickstarter, more than that and you are just a burden on your friends. Other folks I know used that shot to go on road trips with far away romantic partners, or pay for an expensive career training. (This was a little bit before kickstarter etc was America’s main health care platform). I was ready to make to this niche art project my one shot. Or least I thought was. I started getting ready to get a demo copy from a press and I found that I needed to face some unpleasant facts.
First and foremost, the deck didn’t have a name. Tarot decks typically have names that are mystical and inspiring, like the PixelSpiritDeck and Slow Holler. But, being the non-magical person I described above, I couldn’t think of anything. I was at a loss. My then partner pointed out that a tarot deck without an interpretation guide (a book that tells the reader how to understand the tarot) is worthless to most people. I was stuck.
I tried out lots of names: the tarot of the parkway, the highway ghost deck, the Eisenhower, etc. I watched other Kickstarter Tarot artists videos, thought deeply, and hung out near the buffalo in golden gate park. I ended up with the Jacobs-Moses tarot, after Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. A tarot deck built in the spirit of conflict between home and industry, of well spoken and focused titans; it sounds like a fine idea, yet it didn’t match the thing that I made. I got a test copy from the printers with this branding, and everything looked good, but didn’t feel right.
I became paralyzed, I wanted to move forward, to write the kickstarter. But I found that I couldn’t, I couldn’t bring myself to do a bad job, and I couldn’t get the work done. I carried around this ball of anxiety that I didn’t know what to do with. By and by this feeling faded, work heated up in new and surprising ways, I got distracted with applying for graduate school, and the deck got swept under the rug, forgotten mostly.
WHERE DO WE STAND
When do we let projects die? I care deeply about the things I make; sometimes when I am deep in a project its name rattles around my mind, held so closely to my waking thought that it exists throughout my being, I almost breathe its name. This tarot deck was no different, I loved it and carried it with me, despite its lack of name. I was eager to show it off and get feedback, it was what I had going on during that winter and spring. Yet due to time and circumstance it fell by the wayside, it became forgotten. Every once in a while I’d remember it and feel bad that I didn’t finish it.
I now cut this thread. With the release of this write up, I am definitively giving up on this project. No longer will it idle in the back of my mind, humming with quiet possibility, burdening my future. Instead I release it and all assets associated with it under the MIT License. Do whatever you want with it. I have included in the associated Github repository (see bottom) a printable version, though you may have to do some cutting to make it look right. I also include the SVG assets (along with the sketch files for generating them), so that you may slice dice, remix and rediscover as you wish.
The version of the deck that I present to you is mostly preserved in just the way it was when the project reached its little end, with one exception. Before releasing the deck I made a single change, and I’m sure you’ll forgive me. When I started making this deck, the political environment had a much brighter look than it does today, and so I felt comfortable satirizing a nickname of a then rising republican presidential candidate. Assuming, naively, that his candidacy would be a silly footnote in the twenty teens section of American history, right next to our various dank memes and the quickly forgotten silliness of yo. Alas.
Sometimes art changes when you aren’t touching it: I needed to update that card in light of the horrors of the Trump administration.
THE REAL END
This tarot deck was the first really large scale project I carried out entirely by myself. It involved learning a lot of different ideas and technologies. While it was mostly a great experience, in the end: it failed. It failed because I didn’t understand the premise well enough to do the hard creative lifting that would have allowed me to finish. It failed because, while I was the person that made it, I don’t know if I was the right person to have made it. The lesson, for me, is that while good engineering and diligence can carry you a long way, the thing that helps you cross the finish line is a kind of magic unto itself.
I have heard rock guitarist turned philosopher of craft, Robert Fripp, say that in closing creative efforts there are stops, ends, and completions, ordered for the completeness of the work when it is abandoned. This project came to a quiet stop, which has been profoundly dissatisfying to me. I present this article to you now, so that the project, in spite of its failure, might be complete.
Links
You can find the Github for the project, which includes all of the assets under the MIT license at https://github.com/mcnuttandrew/tarot-deck
