Leica Akademie Cards – Become a photography expert, while playing – this pack of cards offers a full year of inspiration and motivation! For passionate photographers and Leica fans, the 52 playing cards define a new task from the world of photography for each week; in addition to delightful evenings of card-playing fun:
graphic design
Leica Akademie Cards
Leica Akademie Cards
Let’s play!
Card game with 52 playing cards. Weekly photographic inspiration.
Info.
The pack is also great for winning rounds of Poker, Blackjack, Solitaire or Rummy! Expand your creative potential – it’s child’s play with the Leica Akademie playing cards.
THE IDEA BEHIND THE GAME
The Leica Academy Cards deck is my personal Leica product and I have been involved in the idea, concept, design and implementation.
The idea was born during the first covid lockdown. Since all Leica Akademie workshops got cancelled I suddenly had quite a lot of time on my hands. It always bugged me, that the Leica Akademie had no physical item in the stores and only existed virtually. I remembered someone mentioning having index cards for memorizing different tasks in photography would be a good help.
I agreed, but flashcards seemed rather dull and boring. And then I came along a website featuring neatly designed card games. 52 cards was written on the pack. 52, hmm? As in 52 weeks in a year. And then it hit me! Why not combine a card game with different photographic tasks?
So I sat down and started playing around with the card layout. Apparently this was the easy part and I had good results in no time. Finding interesting topics and tasks took me a bit longer. I decided to assign four topics to the four playing card suits. I kept a list with different keywords for each task. When I thought of something interesting, I wrote it down.
After a couple of weeks I had enough material to start formulating the tasks. I decided to use english as the language to make the game as international as possible. With a little help from a colleague from the Leica Akademie UK I finally managed to put everything in proper English.
Once I had everything ready I approached my bosses and presented my project. I even made a keynote to point out why this was important to promote.
THE MANY ADVANTAGES
The things I wanted to emphasize were:
- affordable souvenir for visitors
- promotion of the Leica Akademie
- tool to use during workshops
- object to make the Leica Akademie more visible
- help to get better in photography
- inspiration for photographers to try something new
- ideal tool for marketing
QUESTION TO THE MDS FROM LEICA AUSTRIA:
"Can we do the Leica Akademie Game for the Austrian market?"
"No, we can't – We should do it internationally!"
They were quite surprised by the effort I put into this and seemed to like the idea. when asked if we could produce the game for Austria they just replied “no.” I was a bit irritated and didn’t expect the answer. But they explained that this idea was too good not to roll out my product worldwide. They even arranged a meeting with the head of the accessories department where I could present the Leica Akademie Cards. It was a success and we agreed to keep working on it.
The pace of my development slowed down quite drastically but I was still in charge of the content and the design. At first I feared that someone from marketing would take over this project and eventually nothing would come out in the end. Fortunately this was not the case and I finally was able to hand over the print files to the German printing house ASS Altenburger Spielkarten.
Together with Altenburger Spielkarten and Leica I we decided what paper to pick and which packaging to use. I was also asked to do the official product shots. Modifications had to be made but one day I received a package with a first production sample. Oh boy, how exciting was this! A couple of weeks later production started and the agreed amount of 500 deck of cards started shipping to Leica. Since then Leica Akademie Cards are available in mostly every Leica store worldwide.
It’s an incredible feeling of having achieved releasing an official Leica product. It doesn’t make my any richer but glory and honor and the knowledge of being one of few to create a product for such a company as Leica is reward enough.
Go, get them!
