How to use playing cards as a metaphor for choice

In many documents or presentations, you need your stakeholders to make a choice. In fact, the whole purpose of the deck might be to drive that decision. One way of indicating that a decision is required is to provide a not-so-subtle visual clue by presenting the choices as a set of playing cards. Literally: pick a card…

And it’s very easy to create.

Step 1: Draw and format one card

• Create a rounded rectangle in the rough aspect ratio of a playing card. (A standard playing card ratio is 7:5, so you could set the height as 7cm and the width as 5cm, then scale while holding down Shift . But you don’t need to be exact.)
• At this stage you’ll have to guess how big the card needs to be; you can adjust it in a moment.
• Set the rounded corners so they look about right for a playing card. No right or wrong amount here, just what feels OK. The default looks quite good in fact.
• Set the fill to white. But feel free to choose a different colour.
• Use a pale grey for the outline or set a very subtle drop shadow. The one one in the example below has the settings as shown in the screenshot.

Step 2: Duplicate for each option

• Make a copy for each option you have. CTRL+D (CMD + D) will duplicate an object and is the same as CTRL+C, CTRL+V. But quicker.
• Label them. Make sure you give each option a number or letter so it is easy to refer to them.

Step 3: Add the details

• Add a title and any content that you need to each option.
• If you need to resize a card to fit content in, make sure you resize them all by selecting all cards and then resizing them together.
• If you add other content such as images, then group together so each card is one object.

Step 4: Arrange the cards

To drive home the ‘pick-a-card’ metaphor, you can fan the cards. This is optional; you could just distribute them on the slide. But fanning will create a slightly more impactful, memorable image.

• Add a small rotation to each card. Starting with the left-most, rotate slightly to the left, ending up with a slight right rotation on the last card. The best way to make this balanced is to use the Format Pane: right-click on one of the cards > Size and Position and use the up and down arrows in the Rotation box. You need at most 2–3° difference between each card.
• Align and horizontally distribute the cards to even them out.

If they are overlapping, use the Home > Arrange> Send Forward/Backwards commands to put the left-most one underneath and the right-most one on top.

That’s it. You could extend the metaphor by putting hearts, diamonds etc on the cards using Insert > Icons. But be mindful about whether this might tip the metaphor into one about taking a gamble rather than making a choice, and whether that is appropriate in your context.

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