AREA15 I Las Vegas I 2022
On The Decks is a collection of unique NFTs minted on the Polygon blockchain, paying homage to the city AREA15 calls home: Las Vegas. The concept reimagines a full deck of playing cards through AREA15’s own artwork and characters, with each card doubling as a key to a real, unique in-venue experience for the holder and their friends — blurring the line between digital collectible and physical access pass. The Hearts suit launched first, with the remaining suits designed to follow.
I began by illustrating each card design in Illustrator as a flat vector, then brought each into Cinema 4D for dimensionality and individual animation. The result was exported as a web-enabled, interactive .gltf file for every card, allowing collectors to tilt, rotate, and explore each piece in full 3D directly from the collection page.
Each card was built around a mirrored, symmetrical layout in the tradition of classic playing cards, but reimagined through a full cyber-Vegas HUD aesthetic — glowing circuit-board linework, coordinate readouts, and sci-fi interface framing standing in for traditional card border ornamentation. At the center of every card sits a fully modeled 3D character unique to that card, like the glowing-eyed robot figure anchoring the Jack of Hearts — small AREA15-branded characters that gave the deck its own cast, turning a familiar 52-card format into a set of collectible digital personalities.
Release Party — The Portal
To launch the collection, we threw a release party inside The Portal, AREA15’s 360-degree projection-mapped room, where the animated cards were blown up to massive scale and projected across the entire space. I created the mapped scene elements for the room, along with the graphic design and animated flyer/promo video for the event — all built around AREA15’s full cyber-Vegas visual language to tie the physical launch party directly back to the digital collection. The night featured Sama’ Abdulhadi on the decks, along with local support.
