SMLXL and Principi use motion blur to illustrate a fruit fight

The Brand Identity: Every card in Fruit Fight looks like it’s been caught mid-throw. The illustrations – soft, saturated blurs of bananas, pears and watermelons – register as fruit in motion, captured at the exact moment of impact. It’s a purely digital effect, achieved entirely through motion blur applied to vector artwork, but the results feel surprisingly physical, as though someone actually hurled a piece of fruit and you’re seeing the streak it left behind. The card game is part of Magenta, a collection-based card game line from CMYK, the studio behind Wavelength and Monikers.

Where CMYK’s earlier catalogue consisted of standalone titles each with its own identity, Magenta operates as a unified system designed to establish card game nights as a recurring ritual. New York and Barcelona-based design company SMLXL developed both the Magenta identity and Fruit Fight’s illustrative direction in collaboration with Barcelona studio Principi.

The two studios have a shared history – when the project began in spring 2023, they were still operating as one practice under the name Pràctica, splitting into separate entities by January 2024. Fruit Fight’s premise is straightforward: players compete to steal opponents’ most valuable fruits or risk losing their own. The game’s title gave the team their conceptual starting point, but translating it into illustration demanded a specific kind of restraint. The artwork needed to feel fun and connected to the theme.

“The style had to be at the right volume where engaging, while at the same time effortless and supportive of its game mechanics,” Co-founder and Partner Javier Arizu explains. Finding that balance meant the illustrations couldn’t be too detailed or too literal – they had to sit in a space where players registered them quickly and moved on to the strategic decisions that drive the game. The team explored numerous approaches to convey the idea of fruits and fighting, all filtered through Magenta’s broader identity principles.

They settled on an approach rooted in how motion affects an image, exploring what happens visually when a piece of fruit travels through the air at speed. The answer was motion blur applied digitally, a technique that distorts the original fruit shapes into streaked, soft-edged compositions where colour bleeds and form becomes suggestion. The results feel abstract, yet recognisable enough that a blurred banana still reads as a banana. Across the deck, 30 illustrations cover cards one through 10, with three variations of each fruit. These variations weren’t strictly necessary for gameplay, but add depth and surprise to the experience.

Rather than seeing the same pear illustrated identically each time it appears, players encounter slightly different compositions – different shapes, different trajectories, different ways the blur catches the form. “The illustrations needed to be recognised as the same, yet with a slight adjustment that made it feel different and connected,” Arizu notes. Every illustration sits fully within the card dimensions with no elements bleeding beyond the edges, a deliberate compositional decision that creates a clean, unified look across the entire deck.

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The article discusses a unique design approach in a gaming context that emphasizes minimalism and intentionality, which is relevant to brand strategy professionals but not groundbreaking in the broader design industry.