Manifold Markets is something my partner got really into recently. It's a really cool prediction market website where anyone can make a market on anything, and other people can use play money (called "mana") to bet on different market outcomes. It's really neat because prediction markets have been shown to be better at forecasting than merely asking people what they think the outcome will be (because people have to, effectively, put their money where their mouth is) and it's better than experts because experts can simply place bets themselves and the market subsumes them. wisdom of the crowd is a somewhat well-researched phenomenon that does actually have merit.

Manifold already has a great aesthetic, their website is super clean and provides some great fonts to use, and their logo gave me a clear aesthetic direction – origami animals. While the crane doesn't have any significance (as far as I know) other than being the world icon for folded paper, I wanted my animals to mean a little more.

Luckily, the stock market has a history of comparing its investors to animals (I promise this isn't social commentary) the bear and the bull being the most iconic. I did some research and found out that there is a whole barnyard of investor animals out there.

The main issue is that many of them aren't that well known outside of the bear and bull. I spent a while doing research and picked the ones that appeared on the most lists, and were the most visually distinguishable. (The fox and hedgehog come from forecasting and were a great fit too.) Unfortunately the stock animals seem to consist of a lot of dichotomies, the bear and the bull, the rabbit and the tortoise, the pig and the chicken. These don’t map nicely onto face-cards, which consist of 3 card sets and then an ace. Trying to organize the animals into the available face cards and aces was so difficult I decided to make all my assets and worry about this problem later.

The suit icons were my next target after the animals were done. I toyed with the idea of changing the suit icons, but nothing really popped out at me as a super strong investment icon (other than money, but Manifold doesn’t really want to be that closely associated with real-world cash), and besides, customizing the suits definitely causes cards to lose a little functionality. So instead I went with stylized versions of the traditional playing-card suits.

Next was the ever-dreaded card back. Usually this is the hardest part because this is also the most detailed piece of artwork. Additionally, I usually want it to be both horizontally and vertically symmetric, which presents its own host of challenges. The running aesthetic was very minimalist, featuring a lot of line art and clean white cards. I tossed a few ideas around, but decided that a geometric card back would be the correct decision. Usually I like to work with delicate swirls and more organic looking designs, but for this one I just didn’t think that kind of look would fit! I played a lot with triangles and squares. I also incorporated the iconic Manifold logo as well as the bear and the bull to hint at the origami hidden within!

Whew, now that the cardback was done it was back to trying to figure out these suits! During my work on the other aspects, I had been running “cardsuits.exe” in the back of my mind, and had mused about using the aces as a philosophical throughline for the animals. To help me figure out what would work best I printed out flash cards with the animals I wanted to use on them and tried organizing them in various ways on my desk. During this process I ended up doing even more research and discarding some animals I’d previously wanted to include.

I experimented with stronger and weaker philosophical throughlines, such as “thoughtful investors” or “investors looking for quick returns”. In the end none of these themes were particularly strong, and I decided to opt for a stronger aesthetic throughline, keeping the forest critters and sea critters together. Then afterwards I found some philosophical ideology that could tie them together, albeit weakly, and included that on some of the extra cards that are included with the deck.

I mentioned the project a few times in the Manifold discord server and discovered that at the same time as I was working on my project another user was also brewing up their own idea of a playing card deck, but instead of featuring the origami animals, this one would feature iconic Manifold users, as a kind of homage to the community. There was a poll running to allow people to select who they thought should be on the cards. I reached out to them and we decided to join forces. Initially they thought that each person would claim a number or face card, and be on all those cards (i.e. A specific user would be on the five of clubs, hearts etc.)

This is uh, a little weird, and would be frustrating for the average card player since oftentimes it's more important to be able to distinguish the suit of a card than the number. After connecting with him, we settled on each person getting to be a face card. With jokers this actually upped the number of users we could feature, so I think it was a good shift in general. I offered to take care of production and printing, I recycled most of the existing design but changed up what the face cards, aces, and jokers looked like. Getting profile images for everyone was a bit of a pain, and not all of them were amazingly high resolution, but in the end that was a fun project as well!

When I got them back from the printers I immediately saw a few issues. The green that is used on the Manifold website is super light and kind of hard to read on the cardstock, which isn’t a pure white. If there are future runs I’m definitely going to need to make that green darker.

Additionally as much as I tried to fight it, there are some line thickness inconsistencies, particularly when comparing the back to the cardfronts. The back design has a significantly thinner line width than the card fronts. This is... because line widths are difficult to align when you’re working with a ton of assets, some of which are embedded and others which are not.

I didn’t opt for custom boxes, as those add about 5USD to the production costs, however, a problem I’ve had in the past is that when I order similar products in the plain white boxes, they are virtually indistinguishable from each other. This is annoying when I’m organizing product, so this time I remembered to get the windowed tuckboxes.

I did an extremely small print run of these since I wasn’t sure how much demand there would be for something like this. Manifold is still a very niche website, so we’ll see how they do, and that will dictate whether I do another print run or not. I did have a lot of fun trying to work out the logistical puzzle of the animals and the super austere aesthetic was something of a bit of a first for me. Overall, I hope the Manifold users enjoy them, and even if I don’t sell a ton, if they make people happy, that’s enough for me!