Arizona-based playing card design studio Low Priority takes distressed vintage fabric as its starting point and goes further — scratching, scanning and assembling decks that treat the card as a home object and a record of emotional state.
Playing card design has a long tradition of ornament and detail, but Low Priority arrives at detail from a different direction. Devin Dinh’s Arizona studio takes its core philosophy from a single idea: destruction extends from reduction. Where minimalism removes, Low Priority destroys, and what is left behind carries the marks of that process.
The inspiration is fashion, specifically the distressing found in vintage clothing. Those scuffs and worn patches are not damage to Dinh but memory: character physically latched onto a garment, evidence of a life lived in something. Low Priority applies the same logic to playing cards. Each collection is conceived as a captured emotional headspace, and each collection runs to exactly four deck designs chosen to represent that mood. The process begins with thrifting and rummaging, a vague plan and an openness to what might work alongside what.
The faces are made using a technique Dinh calls LASHED. Standard playing cards are scratched by hand, then scanned, and those scanned surfaces become the card faces for the finished decks. The name comes from the idea of lashing out: something spontaneous, inherently unbalanced, the forced receival of an emotionally charged moment. “I intend the decisions from Low Priority as an exploration and extension of playing cards in the context of a home object,” Dinh says. “I sought to maintain the recognisability of standard playing card faces while adding an emotional flair through the signature ‘lashed’ faces.”
The boxes for the mainline collections are assembled by hand from decorative flax paper sourced from Cave Paper in Tucson, Arizona, dyed using natural dyes including indigo and pomegranate rinds. Sheets are cut down by hand and built into boxes for each deck. The connection to fashion runs through the materiality as well as the concept: both the clothing and the paper carry the evidence of their making.
“At this point in life, playing cards are an extension of my personality,” Dinh says. “Low Priority serves to contextualise and document my personality and emotions.”
Low Priority is a playing card design studio by Devin Dinh, based in Arizona. Inspired by vintage clothing and the distressed aesthetic at the heart of their design philosophy, the studio creates decks that treat the card as both object and emotional document.
🌐 lowpriority-studio.com 📷 @lowpri_rity
All images by Low Priority.
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