Blank Face Bicycle cards

Gaffed Bicycle cards

You're a... magician – am I correct? Funny piece of mentalism, isn't it? "Not really, " you might think since, after all, you're browsing this website. And that means you're most probably interested in gaffed Bicycle playing cards – i.e. that kind of playing cards Muggles or average citizens do not even care about. The only exception being if they're handed one of these cards by a magician with a nice little flourish.

Do you use Bicycle playing cards in your own magic? Do you work with them every day? Yet, how much do you actually know about your cards? How many colors are used in printing a single Bicycle playing card? Four? Five?

Granted, most people couldn't care less... but I (being a graphic artist and having worked on innumerable printing projects) did care! So, I bothered to peer through a magnifying glass for you. take a look at the picture on the left: this is a cutout section taken from the Queen of Diamonds. A maximum of four different colors of printing ink (often called spot colors ) are used on a single playing card: blue, yellow, red and black.

Another detail one can observe in the picture is a technique called "overlap of colors" or "trapping" (closely look at the yellow sections) which is used to prevent unprinted paper from showing in the final printed product. This little "trick" is necessary because mass production of playing cards is a rather fast process, which often involves mechanical shifts and stretching of the paper used. As a result, the registration precision when two (or more) colors are printed on top of one another has a certain degree of tolerance (sometimes causing visible gaps if sections of different colors were lined up instead of overlapping).

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