Creating Cards (Addendum)

I decided the second graphics style I used for the other card was pretty crappy (though easy to do/apply). The problem was that it was based off a inbuilt style that was very neat, but I had to recolor it and the inbuilt style was defined in terms of local process colors, rather than a global process color or spot color so it was difficult to change the base color and get all the gradients to re-tint correctly. The styles I was using before were all done by me, so they all used global process colors and thus it was simple to re-tint everything by just applying a different color so I could have encounter colors, at-will, etc. Anyways, I gave another shot at a simple style and ended up with one I liked, shown on the left below. It's basically one area/edge graphics style, plus a quickly tossed together text style that was applied to the header/footer text style tags. Compare to the previous style, on the right. I think I might make a new edge style to use, but otherwise pretty happy with this one.

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NOTE: I changed the original post to use the updated graphics style. You can check out my entire set of images used for this sequence of posts, below the fold.

Creating Cards, part 3

It's time for the final post in this sequence: Final touches & Applying a graphics style to the card.

Creating Cards, part 2

Note to self: When you're in your illustrator document and try to run the customize script and it fails (gracefully!) and you can't figure out why it's complaining that you don't have the layers you think you do, check what document you're in. It's probably right. In this case, I had a document open which had a screenshot pasted into it that I was using to create the images for these posts - looked exactly like my Illustrator workspace, it was the strangest thing when the buttons didn't work...

Anyways, part 2 of this illustrated guide after the jump: I create a customized action card, complete with text, graphic styles and more!

Creating Cards

So I recently did a bunch of Illustrator scripting to make building power cards for my short adventure easier. I was writing up a bunch of this to give an overview in an email, then I realized a blog post is actually a much better venue for explaining this sort of thing, so here it is - be warned it's a fair bit of images, though hopefully they are all pretty small! I'm not sure how it'll look on a RSS feed, either, but as long as you can get near 900 pixels width it'll be pretty good (I think).

Here's the idea: Make it easy to create a very customized card for our game. Here's an example of one such card.


What did I do to create this card? Well, obviously many areas of the card have been customized, and the whole thing has been colored specifically for Sira. More details after the break - all the images here are from my card setup and templates, but it's pretty easy to customize.

Note that it was a bit tricky to get decent image quality for the web while not making huge files, up until I realized I'd chosen a poor format to use. All of the base stuff is in a vector format, so any low quality images here are just my choice of resolutions, etc.