What remains when a familiar divination image is stripped of most of its scenery, ornament, and historical atmosphere? Can a card still carry meaning when a landscape becomes a color field, a figure becomes a silhouette, and movement is reduced to a line?
The Eidetic Order Tarot and The Eidetic Order Lenormand answer these questions through the same modern visual language. Both decks use geometric forms, structured color, clean composition, and selective detail. Yet they do not use abstraction to hide meaning. They use it to make meaning easier to see.
A Visual System Built Through Reduction
The artwork draws on Bauhaus, Cubism, Art Deco, and twentieth-century graphic design. Their influence appears less as imitation than as a shared method: reduce an object to its essential forms, organize those forms clearly, and allow color and composition to do part of the storytelling.
The Bauhaus interest in elementary shapes and color can be seen in the circles, triangles, rectangles, and carefully balanced fields that recur throughout the decks. Cubist influence appears in flattened space and figures assembled from intersecting planes. Art Deco contributes bold outlines, decorative geometry, and elegant curves, while modern graphic design brings visual hierarchy and immediate recognition.
What interests us most is the discipline behind this reduction. Removing detail is easy; deciding which detail must remain is the real artistic challenge. Each image has to become simpler without becoming generic.
The Tarot: Color as Emotional Architecture
The Tarot preserves the Rider–Waite–Smith sequence and its familiar symbolic relationships, but removes much of the antique atmosphere and ornate religious imagery associated with traditional decks. In its place are spare lines and clean fields of color.
Color also forms a practical system. Yellow corresponds to fire, purple to water, blue to air, and green to earth. These recurring associations help readers sense the elemental tone of a card before consciously interpreting every symbol. Color is therefore not merely decorative; it becomes part of the deck’s structure and memory.
The Chariot demonstrates this approach particularly well. The traditional driver is absent. Instead, the chariot is constructed from geometric blocks and directional lines. Control and forward motion are carried by the composition itself, as if opposing forces have been organized into a single route.
In The Tower, a stable white building is cut apart by black and orange lines radiating across the image. The collision of a rigid structure with explosive movement communicates both destruction and revelation. We understand the rupture before we begin to name it.
The original extra card, Order Restored, brings the deck’s philosophy into one image. Grounded blocks of color sit beneath a clock fixed at a precise moment. A key offers access through disorder. Geometry becomes more than a style here: it becomes a metaphor for scattered parts returning to alignment.
The Lenormand: Symbols as Visual Vocabulary
Lenormand requires a different kind of clarity. Tarot cards often hold an inner scene or a psychological process; Lenormand cards behave more like words placed next to one another. Their images must remain direct enough to be recognized instantly and flexible enough to form combinations.
The Eidetic Order Lenormand therefore moves closer to poster and icon design. A central subject is reduced to a strong silhouette, while background planes, contrast, and flowing lines establish atmosphere. The Rider and Ship use open blue fields and white lines to suggest speed, distance, and arrival. Clouds, Book, and Letter use darker spaces and overlapping curves to evoke uncertainty, secrecy, or information in motion. Clover, Heart, and Sun rely on large, centered shapes and brighter color relationships, allowing their emotional tone to register immediately.
Unlike the Tarot’s explicit elemental code, Lenormand color works more through mood, contrast, and visual navigation. The cards remain readable alone, but their repeated shapes and rhythms also help a spread feel like a connected composition.
One Artistic Language, Two Ways of Reading
Placed together, the decks reveal why a consistent art style does not have to produce the same reading experience. Tarot invites the eye into an image and asks it to stay there. Lenormand encourages the eye to move from symbol to symbol, assembling a visual sentence.
In the Tarot, composition expresses process: tension, collapse, integration, or return. In the Lenormand, composition supports relationship: what approaches, what blocks, what opens, and what changes the cards beside it. One works like a psychological space; the other like a concise visual vocabulary.
Abstraction as Clarification
For us, the most successful reinterpretations of Tarot and Lenormand do more than apply a recognizable style. They understand what each system needs in order to remain readable. The Eidetic Order reduces traditional imagery without severing its symbolic roots. Its colors and shapes are not substitutes for meaning; they are a new way of organizing it.
Explore The Eidetic Order Tarot and The Eidetic Order Lenormand.