Library card redesign

Generally I like this new design becouse of clear information it gives but at the same time it lefts not enough space for the illustration and the sidebar is just bleee To make more room for pictures I would move artist's name to the side (like in Selfbiased's version), remove text about cost (it's doubling the same information that iconography gives and iconography is clear in this case) and make discipline symbols a little smaller (something between Ke's and Selfbiased's versions). I like the idea of dropping cards' types icons. The were never good and even experienced players misread them from time to time.

Lönkka wrote:

Also. continuing being blunt, adding the colored stripes to the sides of the textboxes also looks so very ugly and confusing. Self-biased already gave better solution to this, which is the very transparent background color of the text boxes.

Actually I found the partially transparent boxes rather distracting, the "black/white" box system I found interesting and clear. Actually the point of those 'colour blocks' is to identify the 'usage'. If you're going to colour code the card, then as a logical extension, you 'tag' the usages with the colour (i.e. card text that is Combat text is red). There needs to be a way on the text box to tell just what kind of 'use' this card has for cards which have multiple card types. As Ankha mentions in #6, some can have two forms at the one level and hence you need to be able to show that as well quickly; he suggests the old icons but that doesn't remove the symbol problem Ke was trying to address and hence a colour block of some kind on the edge of the 'text block' seems an easy way to put that information there.

Lönkka wrote:

But like just said in my previous reply, actually the colored sidebar with the card type text works better than the old style symbols. I also like Ke's reasoning of removing the card type symbols to lessen the number of confusing symbols (especially for the newbies who must already struggle enough with all the discipline and clan symbols). Besides, why keep redundant info on the card which already are starved for space when you can actually convey the same info in more elegantly?

Mostly it was around 'riffing on themes'. Combine them, play with them, visualise them and see which ones work better.

Juggernaut1981 wrote:

Actually, right there. I didn't like the Discipline Colouring, so I was looking for a way around that. And colour is a great way to signify card type simply and quickly.
Action = Blue
Combat = Red
Modifier = Dull gold
Political = Orange-Gold
Master = Green
Reaction = Dark Blue
Event = Dark Red

Leaving aside the aesthetics, having a key game concept trigger off colour alone is a bad idea, unless you want to cause problems for colour-blind people.

Having colour as a short-cut for people with normal colour vision is fine, when it's backed up by something else - a distinct shape, literal text, font or font decoration (italics, underline, bold etc.), some sort of patterning etc. Having it as the only means of telling things apart is a right royal pain, especially when:

a) for theme/aesthetic reasons, you're probably avoiding certain colours and shades (e.g. Reflex is unlikely to be hot pink, Politics is unlikely to be bright-as-the-sun yellow), so you have a more limited colour palette with more scope for clashes, and

b) you're using individual people's printers, and my shoddy old printer at home that gets used once a year to print out a job application and is a bit gunked up is probably not hitting the same crisp shades as the colour laser print you're using at work etc.

jamesatzephyr wrote:

Leaving aside the aesthetics, having a key game concept trigger off colour alone is a bad idea, unless you want to cause problems for colour-blind people.

That is usually a function of hue-intensity and can be easily determined as being a problem by setting the colours desaturated for normally sighted people and where tones are similar, one of them is changed.

jamesatzephyr wrote:

Having colour as a short-cut for people with normal colour vision is fine, when it's backed up by something else - a distinct shape, literal text, font or font decoration (italics, underline, bold etc.), some sort of patterning etc. Having it as the only means of telling things apart is a right royal pain, especially when:

a) for theme/aesthetic reasons, you're probably avoiding certain colours and shades (e.g. Reflex is unlikely to be hot pink, Politics is unlikely to be bright-as-the-sun yellow), so you have a more limited colour palette with more scope for clashes, and

Sure, colour palette may have issues included, but again, I suspect you could easily find the required 9 or 10 colours that do not clash, are signficantly different for full sighted and the standard forms of colour blindness (the usually being partial red-green but others do appear).

jamesatzephyr wrote:

b) you're using individual people's printers, and my shoddy old printer at home that gets used once a year to print out a job application and is a bit gunked up is probably not hitting the same crisp shades as the colour laser print you're using at work etc.

That problem exists as it is with people using poor quality printers. Very little one can do with that other than recommend you go to 'serious printers' when you want to print them; I usually recommend people print in black and white for deck testing and colour when they plan to use them for tournament-style times.