Anyways, part 2 of this illustrated guide after the jump: I create a customized action card, complete with text, graphic styles and more!
What's next on the agenda? It's time to actually customize the content on the card - we don't want to mess with graphics styles yet, as that's the last step before printing and a fully tweaked out card can use enough processing power that we'd do most of the work in outline mode anyways. So, I start up the customize script for the card layout - It uses the "Text" and "Element" keys in the template to do specialized things for each template, usually filling in information in the right spots.
One of the more interesting options that gets customized for these cards is the action and range icons. The initial template has them marked with element values "rangeIcon" and "actionIcon" -- The script knows these
are special, in particular it expects to find at least one item contained within that a center guide that it can use to place the icons correctly. The other items within are not needed for this step as styles and colors will happen later.
are special, in particular it expects to find at least one item contained within that a center guide that it can use to place the icons correctly. The other items within are not needed for this step as styles and colors will happen later.
Now we pick from the options for each icon - these are actually Illustrator objects called symbols, so if we use them and decide later we want to change every place we used one symbol to mean another,
all it takes it changing the symbol definition rather than trying to figure out all the places it got used.
all it takes it changing the symbol definition rather than trying to figure out all the places it got used.
Here we have the completed result:
The icons are nicely placed, they show up in the layers in the right spot - just above the guide, and we can move on to configuring the text portions.
Note that I turned off guides display here -- in the original (above) the light blue lines are the guides. I turned them off here to make it easier to see the final version here.
The icons are nicely placed, they show up in the layers in the right spot - just above the guide, and we can move on to configuring the text portions.
Note that I turned off guides display here -- in the original (above) the light blue lines are the guides. I turned them off here to make it easier to see the final version here.
Side note: I really <3 Illustrator, after struggling with image layout on the 1st page of this guide, I resolved that I should figure out how to use tools that are designed to do page layout rather than mess with css div / float / etc layout by hand. The above section was done as a single Illustrator document, using slices to mark out html text sections and image sections, including optimize options for each image. Then I hit one save and got all the CSS to cut/paste in, plus the image files which I then uploaded and corrected the links for. Much easier.
Now it time for all the text entries - the things I probably want to customize for each card. Some of these are set to specific defaults and so they'll probably be right without my changing anything, but others I'll definitely want to modify.
The easy ones
Thought-requiring options
Super Mega Difficult
Nearly there! It now applied the layout and with a few exceptions it done it pretty well. The title clearly doesn fit, but that really an issue with the template (or perhaps my naming scheme!). It still thinks it's a card for Sira rather than Chipchop - probably also an issue with either my template or default options. Oh, and there wasn't an option for customizing the class name ("Portalwalker"), so perhaps I should add that since it is tagged.
On the positive side, it did name the card correctly - layer name and all! Also it got a nice parchment background - that's the "RandomBody" and "Card Body" pieces: it picks a randomly chosen parchment piece to use as the background and places it in using the box guide. It looks like the positioning may be a bit off though - that likely is a guides issue, though as we'll see shortly it won't really matter once we apply a graphics style.
On the positive side, it did name the card correctly - layer name and all! Also it got a nice parchment background - that's the "RandomBody" and "Card Body" pieces: it picks a randomly chosen parchment piece to use as the background and places it in using the box guide. It looks like the positioning may be a bit off though - that likely is a guides issue, though as we'll see shortly it won't really matter once we apply a graphics style.
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