Pl. 09 / 16Case study
The belote tournament poster for a bistro in Saultain, on a Friday the 13th: a lucky black cat and a score sheet.
Antoine, who runs Le Quarante-7, is holding a belote tournament on Friday 13 November 2026. He sent me his brief in seven lines: no bidding, 7 to 11 pm, €10 per team on booking, a prize for every team, a light menu, twenty teams. He needed an A3 poster for the bistro and a Facebook post, by the weekend.
The bistro has no logo or brand guidelines: its identity is its sign, white letters on a black band. And belote posters all look alike: green baize, fanned aces, price stars. The poster had to stand out in the window and give every detail at a glance.
On Pinterest, nearly everything follows the same template: I set it aside. On Behance, the playing-card work that stands out treats cards as redrawn graphic objects, in a reduced palette. I kept the black of the sign and the red-and-cream of a deck of cards.
Three images generated in Figma: a black cat at a bistro table, a “Us / Them” score sheet, a jack of clubs as the landlord. I kept the cat for the image and the sheet for the details; the jack is saved for a future poster.
The cat was vectorised in four inks. The score sheet carries the details line by line and ends with the number to call. The final version was cleaned up in Affinity, then adapted into a post and a story.
The tournament falls on Friday the 13th and every team wins a prize: for once, superstition is on the players’ side. Hence the line “Friday the 13th? Lucky day.” and a smiling black cat with a horseshoe collar, holding the jack and the nine, the two strongest trumps.
The details are written like the players’ own score sheet: lines, notes in red pen, the twenty teams counted in tally marks. It is the sheet players have in front of them at every game.
The generated drafts let me compare three ideas in a morning. The delivered poster is vectorised, typeset and finished by hand, with open-licence fonts (Fraunces, Caveat, IBM Plex Mono).
With no brand guidelines, I started from the bistro’s sign: black, white and a serif typeface. This poster’s palette and fonts can serve as a base if Antoine asks me for other events.
Colours sampled from the project visuals.