Saturday, May 28, 2011

Layout for Starter Adventures

It's late here.  Nearly 2:30am and I'm nearly finished with the entire first draft of Starter Adventures.  Red Bear's Tavern is nearly complete.  Just a few more room descriptions and my map mock up needs sent to Rob.  I have to get all my map mock ups to Rob.  Jason and John are very busy artists, but I sent them a few suggestions of what I would like to see.  Jason is working on a cover which I am excited about.

As I am writing this I have been thinking of how to lay this puppy out.  I am a keep it clean, two columns, right and left justified kinda guy.  No fancy fonts.  Two at the most in the manuscript.  But I am thinking with the pictures and mini maps I might just keep it a single column.  I will play with it a bit once it gets closer to layout time, but never too earlier to consider options.

The pros of the single column is I have a lot more room on the page to place maps and pictures.  Do some text wrapping and subtle framing to accent and still get all the information included.  And if you are looking at the manuscript in PDF form on a reader or computer you can scroll down without having to go back to the top on the same page once you read the 1st column.

The cons of a single column format is it doesn't look as professional to me.  I guess I am so used to seeing a two column format that's what I expect to see in a gaming product.  I think most of us expect that.

Just some late night thoughts as I consider my next release.  Have a great weekend.

3 comments:

  1. I don't have a problem with single column. It's working fine for all of these blogs I'm reading. :)

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  2. I recommend using LaTeX, it gives things a very professional look and you can learn it surprisingly quickly.

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  3. You could go digest size. Single column looks fine for that. But if you do letter size it really needs to be double column.

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