Past the P500? CARDS, CARDS, CARDS…
So it was great news to hear that pretty quickly after reworking the graphic design on Red Flag Over Paris that it made the cut on GMT Games P500. Now it was time to polish the work up some more. Luke Billingsley had stepped in as the developer for GMT, and we started in earnest. A rigorous play testing schedule had been maintained throughout the period of my early graphic design work (more about that here and here) and in the final few days before it made the P500.
This play testing was a great opportunity for me as a graphic designer, because it allowed a field testing of the graphic interface of the components before they go into the wider world as a real product. This testing brought several big changes to the cards as a result of game play and some relatively small but significant changes to the map for playability.
As I said in a previous blog, the graphic design I did for Red Flag was relatively rough for a number of reasons. Firstly, as this was still in play testing it was impossible to say what might stay and what might be brought around back of the wood shed with Ol’ Yeller. A good example was the icons and blocks on the upper right side of the cards. I made a simple icon from the Arc De Triomphe art that I was using on the card back and board logo with the intent to make a different icon for each color once the game got to production. The primary reason for making new icons would be to facilitate readability and differentiation, serving both the color blind and (like myself) optically challenged. This turned out to be a good call, because the icons and cubes were removed after play testing. This change would lead to a need to redesign the card layout substantially.
The graphic work needed for the cards was simplicity. The cards were to contain less information and more clarity. With the side bar gone, the design looked chopped up - an effect exacerbated by the black line across the bottom of the middle bar. I have no idea what I was thinking when I put in that black line, but now I had a chance to redeem myself. A quick color change and the dropping of unneeded icons still left a broken up card. Moving the header to the middle of the card then and uncovering the pictures across the top seemed in order, but I still needed to add the ‘ops’ number clearly and to the front. Having stripped off so much of the bars and lines, I didn’t want to add much back in the way of a block, so a simple banner seemed the best option. A little slant to the bottom for character, gold for the color to evoke the color palette of the period of the game setting, and a little ornament to add to the period character were the next steps. I had used an ornament on the card title for more of that period feel and to balance the varying title lengths. Placing the bar in the middle forced me to make it narrower than it had been at the top, as I no longer had extra space due to the text free area requirements of the card die. But the ornament helps.
A second reason for the relatively rough nature of the early cards was that the text was in flux, and it was impossible to know how much text would end up on the cards. There was a plan to include historical quotes if possible, but these had not yet been gathered. Essentially I made the bottom half of the card a blank slate for the text to change and reform and alter as much as development needed. Careful font choice, leading kerning, line breaks and all the other subtle acts of the typesetter’s art were to be left for another day. But now, with the framing reworked, it was time.
So I got down to some typography! Baskerville was my gut instinct for this card layout and with a little kerning, and leading for fine tuning, it only took making the font characters for the cubes and I was on the road. As well as adding cubes, I took the opportunity to color the the relevant text to match the regions on the map. And then I finally had an idea of how much room I had for for the quote and even another little ornament to keep up the period flavor.
The third challenge was to push the card a bit further to create the Objective card layout. These cards needed to be related but quickly distinguishable from the Strategy cards. To keep the look of the the Objective cards close enough to be related to the Strategy cards, I kept the image and the text and changed up only one area of the card - the header. Changing the color of the header would parallel nicely between the Strategy car and the Objective card. The map would provide the colors again, and the the gold provided a consistent region on the those cards for the specific objective to be listed.
Now I had to undertake the card back designs in earnest. I had done some design for the rough, one in black and one with a flag. Neither matched each other (and I needed two for Strategy and Objective). On top of that, the black was too busy and while the flag had potential, it was the Dutch flag when turned sideways like that. Like using the Eiffel tower to represent Paris (it wasn’t yet built in the time period of the game), you have to watch out for these things. As an Irishman, I am sensitive to the difference between the excellent flag of the Ivory Coast and the Irish Flag. I suspected a French person might not want to be operating under the flag of the Netherlands or vice versa. It did, however, represent a good starting point. I pilfered the ornament form the card text area to frame the card title and turned the French flag (respectfully) to the correct orientation. A little color change and a flag shift and the second back was ready. Each card easily differentiated from the other but clearly related.
Finally there was the map. The map was more finished than the cards, but play testing drove quite a lot of changes here, too. On the map, those changes were going to be smaller but multitudinous. Color selections were to be refined for readability, shapes fiddled with, and balance strived for. But I’ll get to all that in the next blog entry, so come back soon.
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