ORIGINS

SUMMER 2024

Smile trading cards began as a simple idea from an 11-year-old boy, "I just want to make my own trading cards". With some paper, colored pencils, and ideas, he sat down and began to build his own universe. Soon after, those ideas began to take shape into the form a series of cards centered around a character named DAN.

While the images and types of 'DAN's changed along the way, the boy wanted to keep the same theme across the cards. A similar face and name but with different versions of the character. He added symbols to the cards so they could also be played as a game. It was a few weeks after he privately began his universe that the first obstacle to creativity appeared... the parents.

The boy wanted to expand his enterprise and thought he might find some good ideas from the larger humans roaming the rooms of his house. They gave him some simple ideas about standardizing the size of his cards so that they might be easier to create and use for games. Dad looked at the size of the trading cards the boy had already been collecting and found that for the most part they were all exactly the same. But just printing out bordered pieces of paper proved to be challenging to confine and constrict the drawing to a specific size. Resizing would only be possible if the ideas were moved to the digital world. At first this was a difficult shift from strictly paper to now computer images, but it started to allow for even more possibilities.

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