What is Taroo?
A 22-card Major Arcana deck and the brand around it, made for reflection rather than prediction. Each card is a piece of graphic design you would leave out on a desk, not a relic you keep in a drawer.
Student WorkBrand Design · 2025
Taroo
A tarot brand for people drawn to good design rather than fortune telling - 22 Major Arcana cards, packaging, and the visual system behind them.
- The problem
- Tarot's visual language is dense, occult, and slow to read, which keeps design-minded newcomers out.
- What I did
- Positioning, brand identity, 22 card illustrations, packaging, and the full visual system.
- The outcome
- A deck that works as a modern design object: one color per card, one shape kit, one typographic rule.
Final Product
The finished deck.
The Idea
Tarot as a design object, not a fortune-telling tool.
Who is it for?
People who would never describe themselves as spiritual but who collect beautiful, useful objects - students, designers, illustrators, journalers, anyone who wants a prompt to think with.
What should tarot feel like instead?
Readable in about five seconds. Approachable enough to hand to someone who has never touched a deck. Reflective without being solemn or occult.
Design Direction
Three words, each written down as something I could draw.
Approachable, modern, and reflective only became useful once each one was turned into a rule about shape, color, or surface.
Approachable
Nothing to decode
No occult symbolism and no scenes to interpret. A card is one shape, one color, one word, so it can be read before you know anything about tarot.
Modern
Flat geometry, high chroma
Everything is drawn with hard-edged geometry and bright pastels, set in a wide contemporary display face. Nothing engraved, nothing gothic, no gold foil.
Reflective
Soft where you hold it
The card back and the box interior are the only gradients in the system. The quiet surface is the part you touch; the fronts stay bright so a reading never feels heavy.
Key Design Decisions
Three decisions do most of the work.
Color, illustration, and typography were each solved once as a system, then applied twenty-two times without exception.
01 / Color system
One color per card, so the deck sorts itself.
Traditional decks run a single palette across all 78 cards, which makes them beautiful as a set and unreadable one at a time. Taroo gives each arcana its own field color, spread around the hue circle and split into three value bands - pale for the cards about beginnings and balance, saturated for the cards about action, and near-black for the three heavy ones.
Color becomes the fastest way to recognise a card, and the deck still reads as one family because every hue is mixed back toward the same pastel base.
- Pale · beginnings and balance
- Saturated · action
- Deep · High Priestess, Hermit, Devil
00
Fool
#C2DEFF
01
Magician
#8E72D6
02
High Priestess
#071551
03
Empress
#FE7DC7
04
Emperor
#FFDC8C
05
Hierophant
#F89B3B
06
Lovers
#B8E6EB
07
Chariot
#C2A1FF
08
Strength
#4A5AE3
09
Hermit
#0F1252
10
Wheel of Fortune
#FFE696
11
Justice
#F5D2D1
12
Hanged Man
#CA294F
13
Death
#E5E5E5
14
Temperance
#CDE4DA
15
Devil
#720000
16
Tower
#C4B1E6
17
Star
#63B6F9
18
Moon
#FB62B3
19
Sun
#FF9C01
20
Judgement
#D7F289
21
World
#2D00F4
02 / Illustration language
Six primitives, twenty-two pictures.
Every card is built from the same kit - circle, square, arch, four-point star, right triangle, leaf - and nothing else is allowed in. Death is the arch with a cross laid over it, the Moon is a circle subtracted by a circle, the Tower is a triangle sitting on a tapered column.
The constraint is what holds twenty-two illustrations together without a shared outline style.
03 / Typography & hierarchy
Two typefaces, three fixed positions.
Card information sits in the same place every time: the arcana number in a tinted chip at the top right, the name locked to the bottom-left baseline, the illustration centred between them. Names never run past two lines, so the layout is identical across the deck.
TT Modernoir Medium carries the names - wide and geometric enough to read as part of the illustration - while Amoria Regular handles the numbers in a lighter, more classical voice. It is the one deliberate nod to traditional tarot in the whole system.
Audience & Positioning
The gap is a deck you would leave out on a table.
Three decks own the modern tarot shelf. Each solves one thing well, and each leaves the same thing open.
Who I designed for
People who would not call themselves spiritual but who love meaningful design, visual tools, and personal insight - students, artists, designers, journalers, and anyone who simply wants a beautiful, useful deck on their desk.
Personality traits
- Visually driven - buys things because of how they look
- Emotionally open, but sceptical of anything mystical
- Curious and playful; collects small beautiful objects
The Modern Witch Tarot
Character-driven · Feminist · Illustrative
A contemporary retelling of the Rider-Waite deck with diverse modern characters, aimed at empowerment and inclusivity.
Still a scene to read. Every card needs interpreting before it can be used.
OK Tarot
Minimalist · Beginner-friendly · Faceless
Simple line drawings, faceless figures, and a single pink palette. The lowest barrier to entry on the shelf.
One palette across the whole deck, so no card is recognisable on its own.
Prismavisions Tarot
Painterly · Collectible · Continuous artwork
Dense hand-painted artwork on a dark ground, with cards that join into one continuous illustration across the set.
A collector's object for people who already read tarot, not an entry point.
Taroo sits where OK Tarot's approachability meets Prismavisions' collectibility: simple enough to read cold, distinct enough to want the whole set.
Brand System
The wordmark is the same kit, overlapped.
T, A, R, O, O are cut from the shape library rather than set in a typeface. Seven shapes make the five letters, and the three places two of them cross are where the rest of the palette comes from.
Seven shapes
Coral#E36D6DT crossbar
Orchid#D96DE3T stem
Periwinkle#7B88FAA
Mist#BFE0F3R bowl
Pink#F154A5R leg
Amber#FBBF37First O
Sky#4BADF4Second O
Three crossings
#BD0051Coral × orchidThe T
#B13599Mist × pinkThe R
#456D2BAmber × skyThe double O
Product Details
Everything the deck ships with runs on the same rules.
The cover treatments reuse the card back rather than inventing a second look for marketing.
- 22 Major Arcana cards
- Gradient card back
- Two-piece tuck box
- Geometric box pattern
- Wordmark and lockups
- Cover treatment system
Reflection
Recognition first, depth second.
Limitation
The deck stops at the 22 Major Arcana. Extending it to the 56 Minor Arcana would be the real test of whether one color per card survives four suits.
Key tradeoff
Dropping figurative imagery makes the cards instantly readable but removes the narrative detail experienced readers rely on. I chose recognition over depth.
Next validation
Print a physical run and watch first-time readers sort it. If they group the cards by value band without being told, the color system is doing its job.