Raising the bar

I’m arrogant to believe that I can write and, to be honest, most of the time the feedback has been pretty good. I like writing, it’d be nice to do it for a living (and not the stressful but boring job at $BIG_COMPANY) but them’s the breaks. In my spare time I write a lot and only a small fraction of it makes it to the blog here.

I have noticed, however, that my layout and design skills need some exercise and possibly even some help. I can appreciate good design, I just have issues doing it myself. Part of this is inspiration and part of it is time (which I have less and less of) and skill (my photoshop skills are not legendary).

Looking at the character sheets I left for download earlier this week, they belie their age. They were done in 2000 or so and were definitely more ‘tell’ than ‘show’. That’s the first thing. They look like Civil Service Sickness Benefit forms. I was sent a character sheet recently that was 7 pages long and full colour. I’ve seen the pre-gen character sheets for Everway. I think I need to raise the bar considerably.

I also need an artist in general as PJ is now going to be too busy and I don’t know anyone else who knows how to hold a pen.

About matt

Gamer. Writer. Dad. Serial Ex-husband. Creator of The 23rd Letter, SpaceNinjaCyberCrisis XDO, ZOMBI, Testament, Creed. Slightly megalomaniac
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4 Responses to Raising the bar

  1. Mark says:

    Oddly, I was planning to write a post asking for advice on ramping up on design stuff like colours, use of whitespace, typography, etc. when I saw yours. My design skill suck (as you probably tell from my custom theme for my webpage).

    (Wow, PJ’s stuff is pretty cool. I’d love to be even a third as good as him!)

  2. matt says:

    Get my email, Mark?

    I think there’s mileage in these days of computerised everything for more effort in terms of design and character sheets. Heromachine for example, and Basilisk also provide excellent tools for making characters. There must be a way to do something similar for character generation but provide much more.

    Whether it’s flash, Acrobat or even some clever Ruby code, an automated web based character generator is almost an essential these days.

    Especially if it prints out in a nice template.

  3. Mark says:

    I did. That’s a very funky character-sheet!

    Creating a tool that can create great character-sheets (with images) is tough because you need a lot more than programming skills to get to work.

  4. matt says:

    I wish they were mine.

    Anyway I think it’s my aim for 2008. Provide a character sheet that doesn’t look like a Civil Service form.

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