So, that spread with the battle scene took time, because had to make the icons, redo the old ugly company stat sheets, and of course rendering (water was problematic).
Mind, that this is the same scene that is on the book cover, just rendered with a different water layer and from the top view.
Also, the Kickstarter in question: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1710384861/sake-sorcerers-adventures-kings-and-economics-rulebook
#ttrpg #sake #sakettrpg #indiettrpg #indiegame #indierpg @ttrpg #rpg #3d #3dart #art #illustration #map #mapmaking
@SAKE @ttrpg Looks good, except those yellow lines on the right hand tables are a complete eyesore. Use that lovely bluish turquoise you have going on as a theme and if you need to mark them as a different kind of table, change the color of the cell inset. Nothing quite as stark as that yellow but some sort of color choice on which the text will retain enough contrast to be readable.
@lextenebris @ttrpg
Thank You for Your feedback!Yeah, the yellow is truly a controversial colour. 😂
I’ll change it, but had to try.@SAKE @ttrpg Part of the problem with the yellow is that it’s hard to get a good contrasting visual grasp on it against the white. And also that it’s different from the background on the header text for that table.
People forget that you really need contrast to make something readable, which is how you get white text on canary yellow backgrounds slashed with pale sky-blue decorators. (Not here; elsewhere.) It’s just a bunch of lines which you can’t trace and which turn into a visual mess.
Always better to avoid that kind of problem to start with.
I think a lot of problems come from not printing stuff out in between. Screen and paper are so different in every way. Size is very hard to take into account on screen, because all the time you are zooming in and out.
Which reminds me: order new printer cartridges!
@SAKE @ttrpg There’s that, too.
But there’s also just straight up contrast density. This was a really huge problem back in the early 90s with a lot of White Wolf products where you would get complex gray and black patterns under black text with multiple curved and linear intersecting lines and it just turned out to be completely unreadable.
The same thing is happening today it’s just that color layout and printing printing is so much cheaper that it’s happening and getting covered up by the fact that it’s bright colors – but if you were to print it out black and white you would have a page that’s mostly just slightly darker gray on slightly lighter gray and it becomes fairly obvious that it’s unreadable at that point.
Oh, typography. Get me started about print density and how way too many books of the last ever have been printed with insufficient amounts of white space and I can go on for hours. It’s like audio dynamics; a sore spot.
The grey thing happened to me also, when I printed out the adventure module I made, to check mistakes. I don’t have the colour ink right now, and to be honest some parts of the module are pretty much unreadable when black and white.
I let it be. I think it’s so much things to take into account everywhere that sometimes it’s just more important to get your things out and do better next time.
@SAKE @ttrpg Always remember that most people are going to want to print out your stuff in black and white because that’s the cheapest option. Whether they use their own printer or take it somewhere to be printed.
This probably means that you’re going to need to produce two versions of the PDF: one in full color, one specifically with background plate images and the like turned off.
This is not actually hard to do if you set things up in your layers in your publishing software neatly so you effectively only have to push the visibility toggle in one or two places to have it be there. This is an advanced technique.
Looking at your work as black and white, both on the screen and on the page, is hugely important for a vast variety of reasons.
Remember, some of your readers may be visually impaired. Low contrast makes their life miserable. Fonts that are too small make their life miserable. Insufficient whitespace between lines make their lives miserable.
The funny thing is that when you design with those limits in mind the whole system gets more readable for everyone, and even people without visual impairments have a better time reading the text, following the text, and enjoying it.
@lextenebris @ttrpg
That’s some good ideas to work by.Try to take it all into account when making the full book. The black-and-white thing is the biggest issue I think, that I have to remember and check.
Just got a idea from it, I have a good friend, who’s really not into reading (dyslectic it’s called?) and as he is also mid-age metalartis so his sight is getting bad (poisonous gasses). So, time to time ask from him, if he thinks those pages would be ok to read.
