Daniel Solis

Sometimes when you're designing a game board, you want to use a meandering path of spaces like an old Snakes & Ladders game. A simple grid simply won't satisfy all the branches, twists, and turns the game requires. That's the challenge presented when we had to lay out the new maps for  Bargain Basement Bathysphere . This layout uses a very clever solution that I'd like to share with you today! The Design Challenge In the image above, you can see how a final map has a serpentine layout, filled with several types of spaces at irregular intervals. We needed a layout solution that would do the following: Allow us to adjust paths of an entire sequence of spaces without having to manually move and rotate every single object. Keep a literal line connecting the spaces to one another, but it must be in the background and ideally not require a lot of manual editing either, since there will be many paths. Use linked images for the spaces rather than making raw vector shapes. T...

Hey folks! I have a new site specifically to showcase my graphic design and book layout. It's danielsolis.prosite.com I've been sending out applications to a few freelance projects that have risen in recent weeks and figured it was about time to get all this stuff in one place. Holy cow, it's weird seeing my old ad projects mixed with my gaming stuff. I'll be adding more work in coming days, but for now it's feeling pretty dang comprehensive.

Evil Hat Productions just announced that they'll be re-publishing Designers & Dragons , Shannon Appelcline's epic history of the role-playing game industry and community. They're going to expand the book into four volumes, each volume focusing on the events of on decade from the 70s through the 00s. Fred Hicks asked me to revise the masthead and create a system of icons representative of each decade of gaming. MASTHEAD This one was tough because we didn't want to stray too far into WotC's official branding and we needed to communicate "designers" as much as "dragons." The usual solution would have been to make each word a different font, as the original title had done. I explored that solution at first, just to get it out of my system, but as you can see from the design process below, we eventually landed on a more refined typographic solution. The slides below are actual pages from the design docs I sent to Fred. Round 1 ...

Jenn Rodgers, J.R. Blackwell and the rest of the Velociraptor! Cannibalism! team have a name: Board Raptor Games . Yay! Buuuuut they needed a logo! They were nice enough to ask me to do the honors. Hard to tell from this is early sketch , but I had a clear outline of where to take the logo. I was taking a little inspiration from the Philosoraptor meme for posing, but I didn't want to resemble on that image too closely. I thought, "Hm. What if he was holding a headless meeple? What if he had a board on his head?" Neither of those really worked as well as the raptor's distinctive silhouette standing on its own. But surely this guy needed *some* kind of clear mark that called to his origins. Then I looked back at the original V!C! Kickstarter . Lo and behold, the solution. A velociraptor with a monocle. Of course! "Board member" or "Chairman of the board." Spiffy. With that, it was a super-easy project. Most of the work was done in one weekend...

Several months ago, Tracy Barnett tapped me to do layout on his new John Hughes/high school RPG School Daze. I'm happy to announce that the layout is done and this baby is off to print. Brian Patterson did the illustrations. Because this would be primarily a PDF product, with options for POD printing, I wasn't so scared of going full-color edge-to-edge. I pulled a bunch of idle high school doodles into the background elements and channeled my inner 90s kid with some of the header treatments. Hopefully I don't date myself too much with this design, though. Mainly I wanted to make a nice showcase for Brian Patterson's art. He's got a great style that's developing into something really special. And holy crap is he fast! There are literally dozens of unique headshot portraits he had to draw to spec in just a week, but sure enough he pulled them out. Really good job there. Elizabeth Bauman edited the text, making sure everything made a lick of ...

Just wanted to share these really quick. I helped redesign my agency's business cards. We only have a few people in the agency who need lots of business cards, but we had been in the habit of printing hundreds of cards for everyone. In the new system, we have kraft chipboard shells with generic information for our two offices. You check the box for your office and fill in the space for your extension. Each employee has a custom printed sticker to fit onto the card. When we get a new hire or promotion, we can just print new stickers instead of whole new cards. Apparently these cards were a big hit at a conference recently. In an environment where attendees are swarmed with free trinkets, they were coming to our booth specifically for our business cards. Neat!

Click the images above to embiggenate! We're wrapping up the final design for the cards in Race to Adventure . You can see a sneak peek at an early draft in this earlier post. I want to give you a light overview of some of the process. At the top of this post, you can see how the icon language evolved over several rounds. The images from that last post were from around Round 4 or 5. Since then, we got some really useful input from the gamma test team. They're all avid Euro board game players. Since there are long-term international hopes for this game, we wanted a global perspective. Mostly the direction was to err on the side of minimalism and simplicity, like a Euro or German game. In Euro terms, this seemed to mean no high-texture or three-dimensional rendering anywhere near the icons. We went back and forth on that point for a while. We settled on the side of three-dimensionality, with some constraints. The essential silhouettes of the icons are still clearly visi...