Daniel Solis

Here are the two basic methods we've used for laying out diagrams in Components and Setup sections of our board game rulebooks. There are slight variations between these two extremes depending on the game, but generally they start with either of these two options. Combined This is one diagram showing a complete game setup. I use numbered tags to that correspond to each step of setup and lettered tags that indicate each game component. Components and Setup from Atlantic Robot League Pros: Saves space. Great for small games or small books. Cons: Can be crowded. Difficult to see the smallest components. Doesn't easily account for optional modules or variable setups. Separate This is a more traditional option you'll see in most rulebooks. There's one "contents" or "components" section, usually a full page or a spread. The components will be neatly organized into a clean grid and individually labelled for ease of reference. The components are not at accur...

I just wrapped up the rulebook layout for The Great Dinosaur Rush , by Scott Almes and APE Games. Kevin Brusky at APE Games was generous enough to let me stream the layout process on Twitch. Now that it's complete, I made a sped up video overview covering the bulk of that whole process. There are still small tweaks to be made to a few words here and there, but the layout is pretty much settled down. Hope you enjoy this peek behind the curtain!

One of the most perplexing challenges of tabletop graphic design is how to design a whole deck of cards with variable text, stats, images, and borders. Fortunately, DataMerge makes that much easier as I describe in my SkillShare course . But there are some advanced problems that still pop up even when you've mastered DataMerge: Namely, inserting icons into any part of the text. I discussed one method of doing this a few weeks ago , but that relied on using a pre-existing dingbats font for your icons and making bizarro GREP styles. As of that post, I hadn't found a reliable and easy to use font creator that flowed seamlessly from Illustrator to TrueType to InDesign. Well, I'm happy to say Icomoon is the app I've always wanted . You can upload your own SVG vector files, assign keywords to them as ligatures, and save them as TrueType fonts. When you type your keywords with this font, it's automatically replaced with the icon you've chosen. All you need to d...

I seem to have stepped into a hornet's nest recently while designing the cards for Arf! In most of my simpler games, I try to include ranks and suits on two corners of the card, so you can fan the cards in either direction. I asked people on Twitter and BoardGameGeek about whether it's worth the clutter in order to accommodate both hands and... wow, the responses can be rather passionate. On one side, we have southpaws who often have to contort their wrists in order to see the pertinent information on their cards. Holding cards as feels natural ends up obscuring the game data. On the other side, we have a few right-handed players who seem really, really opposed to making any visual compromises for 15% of the general population. (I couldn't find firm numbers about how many players are left-handed, but I suspect if color-blindness is any indication, it's more than 15%.) There is a third path, since I'm producing these with print-on-demand services. I ca...

When you're making your first game and doing the graphic design yourself, watch out for these common pitfalls of typography. Click the image below for full-size description of nine different legibility problems and what you can do to avoid them. This image is released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Creative Commons License.

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.

A few months ago, Josh Jordan hired me to do the layout on the Heroine RPG books, featuring female heroes in portal fantasy adventures in the spirit of Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland. He also had J.R. Blackwell do the art for the corebook, a series of photos with really cool makeup and a striking on-location setting. I've done layout on a previous book featuring J.R.'s photography and the challenge is always letting the original photography stand strong on its own without too much ornamentation to distract from it. The layout has to complement the art, not compete with it. Hope I did her work justice! The second book also used photography, but all pulled from public domain resources in the Library of Congress database. Check out the slideshow above for the covers and some double-page spreads from the books! If you can't see the slideshow, check out the images below.

Happy holidays! This season, I thought I'd give something to anyone interested in designing their own card games. You may recall I posted a hodgepodge collection of tutorials I found regarding the use of InDesign's DataMerge feature to automate much of the card layout process. I plan to make a video tutorial of my own soon, but for now here's a .zip file with a very basic example of a DataMerged deck of playing cards. [DOWNLOAD] Open DataMergeExample.indd in InDesign CS6 or DataMergeExample.idml in older versions of InDesign. You'll find empty text blocks and image blocks. It looks like there's nothing there, but there is! These are placeholders for the text and images that DataMerge pulls from the the .CSV found in the Assets folder. When you check the Preview checkbox in the DataMerge panel, you'll see each of these placeholders populated. (BTW, I just used a default font for Mac: Times, which can be replaced with Times New Roman if you wish.) /AS...

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 ...

Back of the Guest Cards County: Wineberry. Mood: Chatty. Interest: food. Power: Mingle. Popularity: 2 County: Dundifax. Mood: Flirty. Interest: Music. Power: Mingle. Popularity: -1, +6 if in a group. County: Boarbottom. Mood: Chatty. Interest: Drink. Power: Extra Invite for Richminster. Popularity: 0, +2 if in a group with a Boarbottom. Drink Ribbon: Awarded to the player who has the most guests with Interest: Drink. Back of the Belle Card Belle Bonus: Have the most guests from County: Crawhole. Belle Bonus: Have the lowest Popularity before any Friend Bonuses. Above is a sample of the current card designs for Belle of the Ball. One thing I noticed from the SuperiorPOD prototypes was that large fields of solid color tended to have a subtle cloudiness. That's common with any digital printer. The easy way to get around it is to use naturalistic textures to mask those imperfections. However, I use naturalistic or photorealistic rendered textures a L...

All week I've been posting charts n' stuff. Figured I'd treat you all to a little something more lush to carry you into the weekend. This is what will be on the back of the passport boards in Race to Adventure . It was just released on the Evil Hat facebook page. They're unveiling more stuff from upcoming projects as they gain more likes. Hint hint.

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...

You've heard me yap on and on about card game design over the past year. Well, Fred Hicks and Evil Hat finally called me on it and hired me to do the layout for their new card game Race to Adventure , the card game set in the Spirit of the Century universe. It's an action-selection game where you play Centurions traveling around the world via jetpack, biplane and zeppelin for a global scavenger hunt. The images above are still in-progress, but give you a good sense of the direction we're heading. It's been a very fast process, starting from a week before Christmas up to the designs you see above. We're on-track to finish up the layout by the end of the month. How's that for a quick turnaround? UPDATE: I neglected to give proper credit to Christian St. Pierre for the illustrations. He's the one responsible for the all the art you see above. I'm doing the backgrounds, frames, iconography, typography and branding. "I do all the visuals the...

These are some thumbnail previews of the game boards in the rough draft of Pop and Locke's Last Heist . If you backed the Writer's Dice Kickstarter for four dice or more, you should have gotten a PDF link on Tuesday. Check your email!