Last year I was spending a lot of time drawing downloadable icons for LMNT, but I’ve taken a little bit of a break away from that to focus on a different project really dear to me, Junior. If you don’t know, Junior is my playing card and game company, where I use my expertise in icon design to create playing cards, dice, and packages for both.
The previous Junior website—I think—was really beautiful, but at extreme cost. The images were heavy, the effects were heavy. As a consequence, load time was incredibly slow, even on a great connection. And in that, I lost a little of what I wanted the Junior website to actually be: a resource.
For the last few months, I’ve been spending significant time creating an all-new Junior website, utilizing a model I think represents the best of the web: Wikipedia. That doesn’t mean that I wanted a wiki-powered site, but rather a site that borrows its encyclopedic style and structure. There are headline page anchors, “aggressive” linking to pages, and I think the resulting page design more clearly communicates that it is mutable, like Wikipedia.

One “problem” I have with the contemporary blog format is that articles are written and finished. Many people have rightly challenged this, turning articles into gardens that are tended to, ideas re-written, until it reaches a more-polished state. I want to do that with Junior too. I want to feel like I can go back and edit a page’s contents any time. To do that, I needed to scrap the previous design, which was less flexible due to its single-purpose style.
My previous websites (LMNT, Parakeet, and Crown) were all kind of built with the intention of showcasing a certain thing. LMNT needed to support icons and wallpapers, Parakeet is an icon portfolio, and fonts for Crown. For Junior, there’s such a mix. I style blockquotes similar to those on LMNT, for aside-element “chats” between characters learning how to play games. I use figure elements to set images and captions adjacent to text like Wikipedia. You can click to zoom in and out of them. I made heavy use of styled tables to outline deck structures, comparable differences between designs, and outlines of win conditions. Styling each component as part of a system lets me crank out a new page quickly, and makes updating them a piece of cake.

I made use of custom “emoji” on the previous site only on “article” pages, but now that article pages are the only type of page on the new website, custom emoji is much more frequently used for things like individual cards. Similarly, I kept inline, highlighted translations, as that’s very important to me, but the styling improved as they wrap lines, which I previously tried to avoid.
It was a goal for me that people visiting this website can quickly understand it. So it aims for familiarity in both long-standing web tradition and modern conventions. Unvisited links and visited links are differently colored (as they should be). Outbound links are dynamically styled with a superscript arrow. Actually, I’m very proud of that.
But perhaps what I’m most proud of is the addition of over a dozen game instructions. Some of them are even new games that I created. A lot of time and care was put into writing clear instructions for how to play games with the products I sell. Each game is written in the same way, with the same structure, and—when possible—the same terminology and phrasing. Each now has clear indicators of how many players can play, what the recommended minimum age is, and a beautiful, distinctive “logo” for every single game.

Instead of providing PDFs of game rules that can change (and therefore the flow of a printable page), I created a stylesheet for printing. So if you print any of the game instructions (or any page for that matter), the design is in higher contrast, removing decorative elements and link styling so it is suited better for paper. In addition, dice games have downloadable PDF scorecards.
The new Junior website is quite extensive. In addition to pages for each game, there are pages for each product I sell (Hanafuda, Playing Cards, and Royals), for the company itself, for me (hi!), my philosophy for Junior, how to play with others, and—critically—pages for hanafuda, playing cards, and poker dice themselves. And of course, the shop.
But there will be more, because that’s the whole point of making this site.
I don’t talk about Junior as much as I’d like, especially for how important to me it is. But if you value small, portable games, please check it out.
From my perspective, games are often overly complicated, taking time away from the social interaction with people close to you. Because of that, a lot of people understandably avoid them entirely. I want Junior to be the opposite. I want games to facilitate social interaction, not monopolize it. To me, the time spent with your family and friends is what games are all about.
For updates to Junior, you can follow along on Mastodon. Hopefully, I’ll add an RSS feed specific to Junior very soon.

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